Parenthetical

3 out of 5 Before Kellen was born, the world was on the brink of nuclear war, followed by a terrible plague that wiped out most of the planet’s men but stopped the war. His father, a teenage boy at the time, survived, along with a handful of others in isolated pockets. Now Kellen is [...]

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After the discussion of trilogies (and Martini-Corona’s eternal John Christopher obsession), I decided this project wouldn’t be complete without a Tripod book. The Tripod trilogy (…heh) might have been the first major YA science fiction trilogy, and is certainly a classic. If you somehow missed these books, the premise is that aliens invade, in giant [...]

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Apocalypse how? Aliens. The Clordians didn’t want to compete with humans for habitable planets to colonize, so they wiped us out. The Clordian Sweep “rapid[ly] disintegrat[ed]… all carbon compounds, which destroyed all life.” (Not to mention all paper records of knowledge, all wooden structures… the thoroughness of this destruction is impressive.) Some people, plants, and [...]

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In Children of Morrow, we meet Tia and Rabbit, slightly deformed (and oh P.S. telepathic) outcast children in a post-apocalyptic village. The primitive village grew out of a military base, worships a dead nuclear warhead, is patriarchal to a degree that would make Margaret Atwood blush at the crass obviousness of it all, and generally [...]

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A group of bad-ass teen criminals get kicked off Earth to be the lead team of colonizers of the planet Klydor. If they die, eh, no harm done. If they survive, ColSec — Colonization Section, part of the massive government that runs Earth — shows up to claim a nicely broken-in planet. There are giant [...]

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All Amy knows is the endless corridors and grimy roach-infested apartments of the city. She’s marked as a possible troublemaker because she knows how to read, but if she keeps her head down and makes enough deliberate mistakes on the school vids, maybe they’ll send her to a training dorm to learn a trade. Until [...]

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This is the precursor to popular recent books like The Adoration of Jenna Fox and the Skinned trilogy. Attractive, athletic Eva is in a coma after a horrible car accident. To save her, her parents agree to an experimental treatment: re-growing her mind in the body of a chimpanzee. In Jenna Fox and Skinned, the [...]

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Last month I wrote a lot about apocalypses and dystopias, a perennial favorite topic here in Parenthetical-land. Those posts, and Presenting Lenore’s Dystopian February, inspired my own theme month: Welcome to Old-School Apocalypse April! I’ve been re-reading some childhood favorites from my YA Apocalypse Bookshelf (yes, I really have such a thing). Some hold up [...]

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One last piece of dystopiana: Research Reveals That Apocalyptic Stories Changed Dramatically 20 Years Ago. Chanda Phelan wrote this article based on her thesis, for which she looked at a ton of apocalyptic literature from 1826 to 2007 and charted the nature of the apocalypse. Click the image at the top of the article for [...]

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Post-apocalyptic and/or dystopian fiction! It’s: a) pretty much all I read as an adolescent, b) what made the hippie I am today, c) ridiculously popular all of a sudden in YA lit, or d) all of the above? D, obviously. The YA lit world is exploding with talk of dystopias. This article from Publishers Weekly [...]

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