Lynn McIntyre’s What We Are is a speculative historical novel that reimagines the United States after the Civil War. In McIntyre’s alternate history, the war ends not with reunification but with the continent fractured into several nations, including the Confederate successor state of Bethel, the British-controlled Victoria, and the Union of States. The novel moves between 1865 and a technologically advanced present day, allowing readers to see both the creation of this political order and its consequences generations later. The 1865 story follows Elizabeth Livingston and the formerly enslaved people closest to her, particularly Sam and Rebecca, as they leave New Orleans for Victoria. The contemporary story centers on Mona Graf, a teenager raised in the Union of States, where racial, religious, and cultural distinctions have been suppressed in the name of social harmony. McIntyre establishes the novel’s alternate-history premise immediately through Elizabeth’s observation that “America ain’t unique. We’re not the first country to fall.”

The book’s strongest structural choice is the way its two timelines speak to each other. The nineteenth-century sections show an ideology being conceived by people who sincerely believe they can prevent future hatred, while the contemporary sections reveal what happens once that ideology has hardened into institutions, regulations, surveillance, ancestry scores, and reproductive controls. Elizabeth and Mona are particularly effective counterparts because neither initially understands the systems surrounding her as clearly as the reader eventually does. Elizabeth’s affection for Sam and Rebecca coexists with assumptions inherited from slavery, while Mona’s confidence in the Union’s Unity Policy coexists with increasingly obvious evidence of coercion. McIntyre uses those contradictions to make character development part of the novel’s political and historical argument. An early line from Elizabeth, “Perspective is funny like that,” becomes increasingly significant as both timelines expose how profoundly perspective can be shaped by family, government, education, fear, and belonging.

What We Are is a novel about memory and identity, especially the danger of believing that human conflict can be solved by erasing the differences from which conflict sometimes emerges. Bethel preserves racial hierarchy, religious nationalism, and rigid gender expectations, while the Union and early Victoria pursue peace through enforced sameness. McIntyre develops the tension between these systems without reducing the story to a simple opposition between two societies. Characters repeatedly discover that ordinary people are more complicated than the governments that claim to represent them. Mona’s encounters with Louis and Rachel, her growing awareness of Finn’s concealed history, and her exposure to identities that the Union has taught her to regard as threatening gradually loosen the certainty with which she has interpreted the world. The historical narrative gives that transformation additional weight because readers watch Elizabeth and Sam participate in the early normalization of the very Unity policies that will govern Mona’s life generations later. The result is a disturbing depiction of how humane intentions, fear, and moral confidence can combine to make repression seem reasonable.

McIntyre closes the novel by bringing its concern with memory into sharp focus. The contemporary characters’ confrontation with suppressed history connects directly to the earlier characters whose experiences have been simplified, forgotten, or repurposed by later institutions. That connection gives the title particular resonance: What We Are concerns not only personal identity but also the histories, relationships, inherited stories, contradictions, and cultural memories from which identity is formed. The book’s mixture of alternate history, dystopian fiction, family drama, romance, and political thought experiment gives it an unusually broad scope, while its young narrators keep those ideas rooted in friendship, grief, love, fear, and the desire to belong. By showing an ideology at its hopeful beginning and then again after generations of institutional power, McIntyre turns the novel into a sustained examination of how societies remember, how they forget, and what can happen when forgetting becomes a civic virtue.

Pages: 247