Everyone has their areas of expertise. Some people are great at coding. Some people can sew awesome clothes. Some people juggle geese. Me? I’ve read a boatload of young adult dystopian novels. And since I’m a giver, it seems worthwhile to share some of that knowledge with the world.
If you hadn’t noticed, YA scifi/fantasy—and more specifically, YA dystopia—is having something of a moment lately. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was the most successful film of 2013, and there are more than 50 million print and digital copies of the books available in the US alone. Divergent dominated the box office when it opened last weekend, and if Wikipedia is anything to go by (debatable), the sheer number of dystopian works has increased dramatically since the turn of the century. These books may be written for teens, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be worthwhile even once you’ve left high school behind.
But some novels are more equal than others, and there’s a lot of variation within the genre. The following is simply an introduction to this brave new world, focusing on relatively recent releases. It includes only books that can be clearly classified as both YA and dystopia, and only those that I have actually read. Continue reading →
Failure in the Making 