"The Sky Inside" by Clare B. Dunkle

A boy and his (robot) dog. In a dystopia.

The boy is mad about getting a robot dog, because he thinks robot dogs are for little kids. Then a product recall notice is issued on all the kids under the age of like 10 (not for anything they have, for the kids themselves); shortly thereafter, an incredibly shady guy shows up and declares that he's taking the kids to a special school where they'll be cared for.

Plot twist: |the incredibly shady guy is doing exactly what he says he's doing. He's actually a good guy who's taking the kids to safety before the evil government can get at them and, uh, kill them or something|.

The main character |doesn't know that, however|, so he leaves the dystopia and goes on an epic quest to find the quote-unquote "school" the kids were taken to. With his shapeshifting robot dog, who also has an inexplicably high security clearance.

There are a few plot details left hanging in this one, most notably "Could we maybe do something about this dystopia hanging over our heads?" and "Where the nouns did the dog get its security clearance?" Those do get explained in the sequel, though, so the book's rating won't get tanked because it didn't explain a bunch of stuff.

(Side note: My brain refused to picture the incredibly shady guy, named "Motley" because that's what he wears, as anyone other than the boss Spamton NEO from the video game Deltarune. He looks like this.)

Spamton NEO.

There are also a lot of not-really-elaborated-upon lore details that the book mentions as almost an afterthought. Some people don't like those, but I honestly don't mind them; the main character wouldn't really think to explain them because he's lived with them his entire life, and they're mostly there for flavor. Except when they set up stuff later in the story.

The title refers to the fact that the suburbian dystopia is housed in giant domes that display an artificial sky, in order to protect the people inside from the apocalyptic outside world (which, in a plot twist so incredibly unoriginal it's no longer even a plot twist, is actually perfectly fine). When the main character leaves the giant domes and goes into the actual world, he gets a sunburn (having never been exposed to actual sunlight) and freaks out because he thinks the sky is trying to kill him.

Speaking of unoriginal plot twists, |Motley/Spamton lying about taking the kids to a school would have been one. We pretty much expect the agents of the dystopian government to be lying when they say stuff like that, so when they aren't is when we're like "Wait, what?"|

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for veiled sexual references (the main character being told that having them genetically engineered and delivered to you is not, in fact, the only way to make a baby).

3 stars. It's a good example of what it is, and what it is is a depressing corporate dystopia and somewhat of a clone of The Giver.

(Endnote: At first, I misread the author's name as "Clark." It's not.)