The Ballad of Ami Miles is a surprisingly sweet dysoptian coming of age tale

Yes, The Ballad of Ami Miles is a dystopian tale of a young girl trying to survive a cult at the end of the world. But it’s also a surprisingly sweet coming of age tale you’ll find hard to put down.

When you first pick up The Ballad of Ami Miles, you’ll probably assume it’s just another entry in a surprisingly long list of recent cult-focused releases. (Thanks a lot to popular documentaries like Seduced and The Vow for this trend, I guess.) After all the story includes family secrets, a post-apocalyptic dystopia, and what is essentially a fertility cult.

Yet, although those things are a big piece of this story, they aren’t even close to the most important element. For all its dark and dystopian feel, at its heart, The Ballad of Ami Miles is a surprisingly sweet and charming coming of age tale, telling the story of a girl who must not only reevaluate the entire world she thought she knew, but figure out what sort of place she wants to forge for herself in it.

The story follows the eponymous Ami, a young girl in rural Alabama who lives in an America that no longer looks much like our own. Raised in a trailer park compound known as Heavenly Shepherd that was founded by her great-great-grandfather, she’s been told it’s her duty to produce children for her entire life and that she should get started on this destiny as soon as possible. As a result of a virus that swept the globe years prior, most women are now barren and only a few are able to still have children – and Ami is likely one of them.

Ami, of course, has never really been asked how she feels about this, so when her grandfather brings home a strange man meant to be her husband, she balks. She’s just sixteen, after all, and has really never met anyone outside of her family. Ami’s decision to flee Heavenly Shepherd and attempt to find the birth mother who abandoned the compound when she was born. And its this journey is what comprises the bulk of the novel.

In truth, I probably would have liked to have spent a few more chapters on the Heavenly Shepherd compound, and a bit of time to directly experience more of the world in which Ami grew up. Sure, it’s obviously oppressive and stifling, but it’s also fascinating – as all cults are – and allows us to see not just about how the world of this story has changed, but how people are surviving in it.

Alley’s worldbuilding, both here and later in the novel, when Ami arrives in a new location, having decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps literally as well as figuratively, is sly and slow, showing much more so than telling, which is why you may find yourself yearning to know more about the government’s decision to silo pregnant women in camps or the rumored squads of men who monitor families in case someone happens to give birth.

But the best part of the novel is Ami’s arrival at Lake Point, in which she, for the first time, discovers that other people outside of her family not only exist, they aren’t bound by the strict theological norms with which she was raised. As she tenatively learns to make friends on her own, comes to terms with the mother who left her behind, and explores the kind of woman she wants to become, her journey is charming to witness without ever becoming cloying.

As she meets people of different races, backgrounds and sexualities, Ami’s understanding of the world broadens and deepens, and she realizes that she herself is free to choose who she wants to become.

This certainly isn’t a groundbreaking tale by any means, but Ami’s sheltered past, and eagerness to see the world that’s been held back from her, makes the standard coming-of-age tropes feel purposeful, rather than staid and dull. Her burgeoning closeness with Jessie, another Lake Point resident who is also something of an outsider, is a sweet highlight.

The Ballad of Ami Miles is available now. Let us know if you add it to your TBR pile this winter!