Marked is a dystopian novel featuring graphic novel vignettes. Lyla, the sixteen-year-old protagonist, lives in a bleak, controlling society where only most favored and smartest students succeed. Trying to get ahead in school, she buys cheats in an underground shadow market, is caught, and then tattooed, “marked”, as a criminal. When she is offered a way to redeem herself, she jumps at the opportunity, but redemption comes at a cost. Will she have to betray the boy she loves? Will she lose even more than she thought possible? The graphic novel–style vignettes reveal the history of this dysfunctional society, and help provide Lyla with guidance and clues to a possible way out of the double bind she finds herself in.