{ "item_title" : "The Restoration Effect", "item_author" : [" R. L. Pence "], "item_description" : "Every effect has its cause.For thirty years, a city lived under a dictator that could not bear the suffering of others. It was the shape of a kindness, twisted until it was unrecognizable beside the good faith it had grown from. But freedom was inevitably restored, and it was its own kind of monster: raw, unrequited emotion flooding into a system that had neither the capacity nor the foundation to hold it, until the pillars began to crumble under the weight of the world they had been denied.Is freedom, then, preferable, if the effect is a culling of the most vulnerable? Perhaps if one only redirected that overloaded feeling toward the community, so that all could share the weight together, that would surely be a just and right action, one that would bring about the most good in this city. Only, when something is redirected, something else is deprived, and another is overburdened again.It is the dam built at the end of a valley. Does the creation of the surplus justify the destruction of the homes and memories made in that valley? Maybe. Now consider that the settlements were never told the dam was being built. Does that change the calculus?Effects: the consequences of agency. It seems that every choice can only be made in the knowledge that one thing will be destroyed in favor of another. We can only hope that the entropy we set in motion does not catch up with us too quickly.To restore a thing is to devolve it, to bring it back to a time in its past when it was in its primacy. But doing so carries a cost that is none too often reckoned with before the act bears fruit. That fruit is the Restoration Effect, and its cause is folly.Now freedom has returned, and with it everything the old order never allowed: grief, anger, hunger, and need. A new instruction moves through the city-Need finds its neighbor-teaching people to carry one another's burdens instead of surrendering them to the system that once harvested their feelings for power.Elara helped build that change. She believes it is working.Then the quiet beneath the city begins to shift. A maintenance worker finds pressure moving through pipes that were built to carry only water. In the settlements beyond the dome, care is becoming a currency-and some people are learning to take without ever letting their own need be seen. And in the walls of the dome, something sealed away has begun to listen: to hunger, to gratitude, and to the language of care.As Elara travels west in search of her mother's country, she must confront the consequences of the world she helped remake. Dismantling a system that harmed people was never the same as building one that cannot be exploited. Freedom has arrived, but so has everything it was denied-and someone, or something, is learning how to use it.The Restoration Effect is the final book in the Echoes of Nothing trilogy: a story of memory, responsibility, and the dangerous difference between helping someone carry their pain and taking it from them.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/818/291/9798182913706_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "45.00", "online_price" : "45.00", "our_price" : "45.00", "club_price" : "45.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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