Review: Truth Needs No Colour by Heather McQuillan

Fifteen-year-old Mariana is keeping quiet. Her mother – an outspoken activist – is dead. Her father is missing. And now she’s been sent to live with her grandparents in the cyclone-battered South Island, where ash still clings to the windowsills and the school system has been hollowed out by a faceless corporate giant called Carapace. Silence, she’s been told, is safest. But silence has teeth. It bites down hard.

Heather McQuillan’s haunting new novel Truth Needs No Colour creates a version of Aotearoa that feels both speculative and alarmingly familiar. There are no alien invasions or burning cities. The dystopia is built from the bones of the present: classrooms stripped of colour, creativity smothered by standardised testing, children herded toward a future that doesn’t belong to them. It’s grey, suffocating, and terrifyingly plausible.

McQuillan wastes no time with exposition. She drops us straight into Mariana’s fragile new life. On the morning of her fifteenth birthday, Mariana receives a red dress from her grandmother. When she wears it to school, she unknowingly breaks an unspoken rule. The dress is too bright, too bold, too much. Her classmates fall silent. Her teachers close ranks. What begins as a quiet gesture of self-expression unravels into something far more dangerous.

‘I cut across the dusty market ground and there was the underpass and there was me wearing the red dress and a silicone wristband that felt heavy with all that data. A guard near the wall straightened up, locking eyes on me. He wore a green camouflage uniform in a place devoid of greenery. He lifted his gun, made it nod a sinister greeting at me, and ushered me through.’

At the heart of the novel is Mariana’s relationship with Filiki, a gentle boy trapped in the school-to-prison pipeline that Carapace has perfected. Mariana wants to defend him, but fear holds her back. When she finally does speak out – publicly, bravely – it backfires. The fallout places not only Mariana but everyone she loves in danger. She’s left to reckon with the cost of telling the truth in a world that punishes it.

McQuillan builds her world with sharp, deliberate strokes. She doesn’t overplay her hand. She lets the system speak for itself – cold, bureaucratic, and eerily polite as it swallows kids whole. Creative subjects are axed. Expression is monitored. Even the teachers, some complicit, others terrified, move like shadows across a stage they no longer control.

Yet, despite this, McQuillan’s prose is quietly tender. Mariana’s relationship with her grandparents is a particular highlight. Her gentle, resilient Nana Isla and steady, stoic Grandpa Jack offer warmth and gravity. Their home is one of the few places in the novel that still feels human, even as the outside world creeps in. 

McQuillan’s greatest strength is her ability to write teenagers as they really are: messy, thoughtful, afraid, and brave all at once. Mariana isn’t a hero in the traditional sense. She’s a teenage girl with a sketchbook full of art she’s not allowed to share. She’s scared.  She’s grieving. Her journey is small in scale but massive in emotional weight. 

Truth Needs No Colour could have been a bleak novel. But it isn’t. It’s angry, yes. Urgent, certainly. But there’s hope woven through its pages. Not grand, sweeping hope, but the quiet kind that insists one single, trembling voice still matters.

For teenage readers, especially those navigating schools that don’t quite fit them, this book will resonate deeply. For adults and educators, it offers a chilling look at where things could go if we stop paying attention. For fans of The Giver or The Handmaid’s Tale, this one will hit hard. This is a story that asks what happens when the truth becomes dangerous – and what might occur if we choose to tell it anyway.