Following [b:Catfishing on CatNet|41556068|Catfishing on CatNet (CatNet, #1)|Naomi Kritzer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1568119890l/41556068._SY75_.jpg|64836558], Chaos starts with Steph and her mom relocated to Minneapolis and Steph going to a school that she hopes to graduate from. At the school, she meets Nell, a girl who was separated from her rural religious community after her mother went missing without a trace. Nell, who co-narrates, finds herself living with her father and her father's female partner--and each of their female partners, who Nell calls Things 1, 2, and 3. It turns out that Nell has a secret that makes her more relatable to Steph than she might have thought at first. After a lifetime on the run, Steph is sympathetic to a newbie at school. Plus she's got her own personal AI, Cat, should anything funky transpire.

As you might imagine, funky things transpire. Steph, her mom, her friends, and Cat find themselves needing to stop hordes of Christians and pranksters being manipulated by...another AI and its dangerously misguided human, as they try to reboot humankind.

Placing her novel in a near-futures Minneapolis (with a Floyd Plaza), Kritzer uses Chaos to explore what law enforcement might look like in a mostly post-police city. The way she imagines it made me nervous at first.

"Minneapolis has a really unusual police department," Hermione says, "Like it's got very few actual police."

Steph responds

"Anyway, last night, the police I ran into were all very nice to me. They kept giving me vouchers to buy myself a warmer coat. And some of them didn't even have guns.

I thought maybe Kritzer was mocking a force comprised of social workers, but twenty pages later, Hermione brings the issue up again.

"Which means that in a situation they're not in control of, [police] tend to overreact, and they prioritize control over public safety, which generally makes rioting worse. Minneapolis's public safety department treats riots more like a wildfire--barriers that make it harder to spread, for example."

Okay. That is a good assessment of what's wrong with policing. Kritzer herself writes in the book's author's note

I tried to provide a plausible vision of public safety workers whose first priority is public safety

I like it, though I'm not sure she makes her case. Still, in teens save the world novels, there's really no room for anyone but the teens to save the world.