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It was a special lesson. The children had spent several days before this lesson retouching signs and labels, singing extra rounds of marking songs. Teacher Jonas monitored them closely, punishing the careless. Finally, the children gathered in the classroom. The lecture was short. Teacher Jonas stood at the desk, his face tense and grim. In a silence so complete one could hear one's own pulse, Jonas spoke. His powerful voice sounded thin.
A long time ago, when the pioneers came here, they built five colonies. Now only four remain.
When the lesson was over, the children spent the rest of the day singing marking songs and retouching signs and labels with a new intensity. It wasn't a game anymore.

I actually really enjoyed this - though maybe appreciated is a better word for something so grim. It reminded me a lot of the experience of reading 1984, with the reader being dropped into a world so firmly controlled, the origin of which we don't really explore, but the effects of which we really do. In this novel though, language and knowledge as a form of control are taken even further, to a world where language literally shapes the world around you, where forgetting to keep a clearly marked toothbrush (for example) means the next thing you know, your toilet bag is full of sludge and has to be disposed of with biohazard caution.

That concept makes the dystopian nature of the colonies and the lives of those within them even more interesting - is the control there because of the nature of this world and the need to regulate language? Is it co-opted, partially or fully, into a way to keep people in line? And what can you trust when an opinion could literally become fact?

Amatka left me with more questions than answers, and I'm quite enjoying mulling it all over. I love books that can provoke thought like that, and raise the right topics to lead your thoughts into interesting areas of consideration. I might have liked a slightly less bleak ending, but I'm not even sure it was entirely without hope - I might have liked a little more exploration of the world and these characters before we left them, too. But I'm glad I read this, and will definitely be exploring more from the author.