Where It All Goes Down
Portland, Maine
City Limits
They walk down the streets of Portland, avoiding the traffic for the allergy pride parade and the people living like it's the 1890s… Oh, that's Portland, Oregon. This book takes place in Portland, Maine.
Really, though, it could be set in any town with stringent rules on life and love. According to Lena, in the U.S., "it has been sixty-four years since the president and the Consortium identified love as a disease, and forty-three since the scientists perfected a cure" (1.1).
This society dictates who to marry, how many kids to have. They watch everyone like Big Brother. It's very patriarchal. The committee who ranks people has four men and one woman, and women are told how many kids to have.
They've done a good job of perverting the values we currently hold in our nation, like the Fourth of July. Lena describes it as, "the day of our independence, the day we commemorate the closing of our nation's border" (8.2). What she doesn't realize is that this border closing represents their total dependence on the government's sketchy cure for love.
See, the U.S. is totally cut off from the outside world. Lena mentions, "the intranet [...] is controlled and monitored for our protection" (8.15). Notice it isn't Internet: it's intranet. Therefore, this U.S. is more like some of mainland China—it's got no access to the outside world.
The government even controls the music people can listen to. They mandate songs that are "prim and harmonious and structured" (9.33), which we guess is like being forced to listen to Celine Dion all day when all you want to do is jam out to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Once Alex tells Lena to start questioning her government and its rules, she sees Portland as "something in danger of dissolving" (19.7). Maybe she's talking about civilization itself. Or maybe just her own conventions, which have been hammered into her since birth.
Tales from the Crypts
The Crypts is Portland's mental health facility/prison. "Mental health" is being generous here. Crazy house or insane asylum might both be better descriptive terms for this place, on account of the horrors that happen inside.
Lena sees that the "prisoners", not patients, don't even look human. They've reverted to a feral state and receive no sort of care. The staff seems to basically be waiting for the prisoners to die.
Into the Wilds
The Wilds is the big scary world outside of Portland's city limits. But the Wilds aren't actually so wild. The government's portrayal of this area is just propaganda that's meant to help control the people.
By deeming everything outside of the city limits the Wilds, and putting a fence up to keep people inside the city, the government sends the message that it's safe to be in Portland—and it's darn scary out there. So let us protect you. C'mon, you'll be grateful we did.
Most people, including Lena, swallow this Kool-Aid without a second thought. Lena even describes the Wilds as "like a monster reaching its tentacles around the civilized parts of the world" (10.60). What changes her mind? She goes there.
As it turns out, her beloved Alex is from there. So it's not just "dark and dead, full of only the rustle and whispers of animals" (10.9) after all. One day, he takes her through the fence, and she sees that it's actually kind of nice. Sure, they're roughing it, but it's, like, nature and stuff.
And it is safe there. The people who live in the Wilds trade with each other and generally helping each other make ends meet. Unlike Portland, which is surrounded by an electric fence, the Wilds is a place with no walls. No mind control. Just people living peacefully.
The Wilds are the utopia to Portland's dystopia.