The List

The List is a 2015 novel by Patricia Forde. Written for young adult audiences, The List is a dystopian story with elements of adventure, horror, and science fiction. It is the first book in Forde’s List series. The List tells the story of Letta, an apprentice wordsmith in a city known as Ark. Ark is the only known landmass that survived the flood known as the Melting, which was caused by global warming and catastrophic floods. Forde uses Letta’s story to examine themes of The Power of Language, the gift of Identity and Self-Expression, and Censorship and Control in authoritarian regimes.

This guide refers to the Kindle e-book edition.

Plot Summary

When the story begins, Letta is an apprentice to Ark’s only wordsmith, Benjamin. Their job is to collect all known words and to catalog them in Benjamin’s private study. Citizens of Ark are required to speak a rudimentary language called List, which is currently composed of only 500 approved words. Using non-List language results in demerits on a tally stick. After 20 infractions, language offenders are banished to the forest beyond Ark, which is inhabited by other offenders and wild animals.

Each chapter begins with a word and its definition. Most words are on the List, but some are forbidden. Several chapters end with an italicized internal monologue from John Noa, the creator of the city, as he contemplates the past, present, and future of Ark.

One day, Benjamin goes on a routine word-finding trip and never returns. While she is alone in the wordsmith shop, Letta opens the door and admits a wounded young man named Marlo. He has been shot by a gavver—a member of John Noa’s security detail. Letta doesn’t know it yet, but Marlo belongs to a secret society the citizens of Ark call the Desecrators. Desecrators were known as “artists” in the old tongue, and they now call themselves Creators.

Ark is the project of John Noa. Noa was a friend of and collaborator with Benjamin, and prior to the Melting, the two of them tried in futility to warn people about global warming. Noa prepared the city of Ark prior to the Melting, and now operates as the city’s allegedly benevolent leader, although he is closer to a dictator. Noa is protected by gavvers and a group of soldiers known as the Green Warriors. He blames language for humanity’s plight. People can twist themselves and manipulate others through words, and politicians placated people with empty words until it was too late to avert the disaster. Unbeknownst to most, Noa wishes to return the earth to a pre-language state by putting a chemical called Nicene into the water supply, which will destroy the part of the brain that governs language.

Letta becomes more involved with Marlo, Finn—one of the Desecrators’ leaders—and other Desecrators after a scavenger named Smith Fearfall reports to have found Benjamin’s body. Letta is now the wordsmith. As she tries to do her job, she witnesses several demonstrations by the Desecrators. In the first case, she sees a woman named Leyla dancing and playing a saxophone in a field. In the second, she sees the imprisonment of a painter named Hugo after he defiantly displays a painting of the forest. She visits Hugo in prison and learns that he will be banished, which means certain death.

Letta learns that Benjamin is alive when someone leaves a message in the shop’s drop box. She, Marlo, and Finn orchestrate a mission to find him in the forest when the gavvers banish him. They reach him in time, but Benjamin has been tortured. He dies of his injuries, but first, he tells Letta that he has left a gift for her in the shop.

As Letta learns more about Noa, she realizes that he is lying. He is trying to destroy all language. She begins working with the Desecrators—and Noa’s only love, Amelia—to stop his plan. Letta learns that her mother, Freya, was one of Amelia’s sisters. Letta was raised in Noa’s home until age four, when her mother, Freya, and her aunt, Leyla betrayed the laws of Ark.

Leyla is also captured while pregnant with Finn’s baby. Noa orders a gavver to kill her, which leads Amelia to leave him. At the novel’s climax, Letta hides in a water barrel and rides it to the top of Noa’s tower, where she foils Noa’s plan to poison the water supply with Nicene. During a battle between the resistance and the gavvers, Noa falls from the platform and dies.

At the novel’s conclusion, Noa is dead, and Amelia has assumed power. Letta continues to hope that her parents are still alive and that she and her new allies will have the strength to protect Ark from Amelia and Noa’s loyalists. To help her, she has Benjamin’s last gift. He left her parents’ maps and charts to guide her through her next steps.