Me the reader has been fascinated with Gemm's world, where people wear colored silk masks to represent conformity, everybody has a twin, and sex as we know it is a thing of the past. "Conformity begets Harmony begets Tranquility begets Peace begets Universal Good." Gemm has been having strange dreams and hearing music, this strictly forbidden. He feels like he needs to be able to dance and sing and can do more than 1000 choices because that’s not enough, we make more than 100,000 decisions a day either it is to say, write or even turn around. It is the twenty-fifth century, and Gemm 16884, who has feelings and emotions, is not in step with the rest of his dystopian society. Offered a choice between "recycling" or a cure that will break him and acceptably remold him, Gemm takes the cure. The Elders believe that transporting Gemm to Strasbourg to suffer the horrors that Johannes went through will cure his love of music forever. But the cure itself is so unsure that it has an opposite effect, causing Gemm to return with renewed passion and the conviction to change his world. Sixteen-year-old Gemm and his twin sister Gemma are in a future world where peace and tranquility reign. Raised to follow a strict code of conduct from birth, they have been …show more content…
Gemm's experience in Strasbourg is horribly discussing and emotionally torn apart. The culmination of the cure, is in which the Jews of Strasbourg are burned to death,as this is shocking and powerful. He lives in a segregated community, where corruption and rampant antisemitism are a daily fact of life. He is “prohibited from becoming a tradesman or a guild member”. His family is "taxed" mercilessly to pay corrupt officials' protection money. It's all that he and his father can do to keep their family alive. Around them, a ravaging pestilence is tearing through the land as the “Black Death” turns prosperous villages into grisly fields of the death and