Hadrian’s Rage by Patricia Marie Budd is a fascinating inside look at a country in the 22nd century in part of what was Canada. In Hadrian’s country, homosexuality is the norm and heterosexuality is frowned upon and, until recently, illegal. Hadrian was named after him by the homosexual Roman emperor and his goal is population control and environmental restoration. Heterosexuals are blamed for both attacking homosexuals and overpopulating the earth, which is why scientists have genetically altered humans to make them homosexual, although some still have heterosexual or bisexual tendencies. While it is not illegal to be straight, anyone caught having straight sex is sentenced to death due to the danger overpopulation poses to the country and the world.

However, those with heterosexual tendencies do exist. Before the novel begins, Todd Middleton, a popular basketball player, was one of them. When he was caught having sex with his friend Crystal Albright, he was sent to a reeducation camp where the camp director used extreme measures to try to erase his heterosexual feelings, including rape. Desperate, Todd begged his best friend, Frank Hunter, to kill him for mercy. Frank did, and as a result, Frank is now serving a life sentence in Hadrian’s army. (These events occurred in Hadrian’s Lover, of which Hadrian’s Wrath is a sequel, though it is also a stand-alone novel.)

Such is the situation when Hadrian’s Rage opens. Frank Hunter’s family has been torn apart: his parents, Geoffrey and Dean, have split because Dean, who also underwent re-education in his youth, is now unwilling to deny his heterosexual tendencies. Dean has become part of a Gay-Straight Alliance on a college campus. Meanwhile, a member of Hadrian’s media is no longer willing to promote anti-straight gay propaganda. Melissa Eagleton, a leading national news anchor, quits her job when the station owner wants her to promote her agenda instead of letting her report the truth. When Melissa establishes a rival station, new opinions begin to be expressed in Hadrian. Simultaneously, straight people start appearing in public, holding hands, and are attacked as a result. And then a young college student, Tara May Fowler, is brutally beaten to death after coming out with two other girls she thought were her friends. In the midst of all this chaos, will Adriano be able to survive, or will he collapse and allow the hordes of straight people seeking to breach his walls to take over and destroy the land?

Author Patricia Budd has done an amazing job of not only imagining a world of reverse discrimination, but also bringing home the fact that this world is a thin metaphor for ours. Throughout the novel, she provides footnotes that reference real-life events in recent years that are the basis for scenes in the novel. For example, the death of Tara May Fowler is based on the brutal murder of Vladislav Tornovoi, who was raped with beer bottles, tortured, and murdered by two of his friends on Friday, May 10, 2013, in Volgograd, Russia, after leaving from the closet. them as homosexuals. The book is dedicated to Tornovoi’s memory.

Patricia Budd certainly knows how to create an intriguing fictional world. The reader sees how badly Hadrian’s people behave, despite their good intentions, and is both saddened and shocked to think that such things are happening in our own world today. Budd’s pacing is fabulous, with short chapters and news reports to keep the reader constantly wondering what’s next. She also does an excellent job of juggling multiple plotlines and characters so the reader never gets bored. Most importantly, she creates realistic and endearing characters who search their hearts for the truth and then find the courage to act on it. Readers will fall in love with Destiny Stuttgart, the last of Hadrian’s founding families, who stands up for what she believes is right, even when people say she goes against the country’s constitution and dismiss her as old and senile. And then there are the characters whose hearts are in conflict, who want revenge but fall in love with their enemies. In the end, the novel offers a profound and moving expression of how overcoming prejudice and being open to forgiveness can change the world.

I thought Budd’s previous book, Hadrian’s Lover, was a very imaginative and powerful novel, but now Budd has replaced it. Hadrian’s Rage blows my mind. I don’t think anyone who reads this book will ever forget it, and hopefully it will help change the world, one heart at a time.