Ordinary Rare

Book Blurb
Evan Lark wakes under a canopy of leaves with a name on his wrist, a city of heart-soft signage at his back, and a past that doesn’t quite fit the body he’s in. In Veridia—where men are one in eleven hundred—safety is a choreography: knock, announce, proceed. Drones hum, doors sigh, and every rule is wrapped in kindness with teeth. Evan is grateful for the care; he’s also done being curated. He wants to be choosably present—strong on his own terms, seen without being consumed, wanted without becoming anyone’s story to manage.
As Evan tests the edges of his world—home kitchens and clinic corridors, public greens and small civic stages—he learns to read attention like weather and hold his ground with a word. Along the way come first real friends, a first love that insists on consent as a language, and a slow recognition that “protection” can harden into a cage if no one names it. The farther he walks, the sharper the choice becomes: accept the life built for him, or risk building the life he was meant to live.
Ordinary Rare is tender and wry, intimate and quietly defiant—a coming-of-age about dignity, boundaries, and the stubborn right to define yourself in a world that thinks it already has. If you love the humane, hope-tinted futurism of Becky Chambers; the unsettling tenderness of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go; the power-and-policy inversions of Naomi Alderman’s The Power; or the gentle, attention-savvy wisdom of A Psalm for the Wild-Built, this will be your next favorite. Fans of The Handmaid’s Tale who wonder what happens when the theater of “care” turns the lights on itself—and readers who crave character-forward worldbuilding with teeth—will feel right at home.
For anyone who has ever wanted to be more than a rare thing on display: this is a story about learning to be ordinary, and choosing to be rare, at exactly the same time.