Parenthetical

A friend just shared with me the art of Thomas Doyle, which I share with you because every sculpture I click on has me writing a new twisted YA post-apocalyptic/dystopian novel in my head. For instance, this. Or oh god, this. Sometimes they’re zombie novels. Yeesh.

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I wrote this review when I read the book back in the spring, but as I talk about some spoilers below, I wanted to wait until it comes out. Which is tomorrow! I think Karen Healey is one of the best current YA authors, period — up there with Melina Marchetta and John Green. Don’t [...]

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Maybe Genius is really hitting it out of the park today (and by “today” I mean “the day I picked to catch up on my last month of feeds”). Here’s a handy list of dystopian tropes. I’m thinking about using it to create Dystopian Bingo. Would you play with me? A couple of favorite bits: [...]

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Amy and her parents are frozen cargo aboard a generation ship bound for Centauri-Earth. In 350 years they will be awakened to build humanity’s first colony on a new planet. 300 years into the voyage, the crew — many generations born and raised and died on the ship — are led by a series of [...]

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The sequel to Incarceron. No point in reading this review if you haven’t read the first book and are planning to, so SPOILERS AHEAD for both books! I wanted to love this. I really did. And there were many things I did love — it’s tense and thrilling in many places, and I was happy [...]

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…or not, depending on how the contributors read the question. The introduction to the NYTimes article “The Dark Side of Young Adult Fiction” seems to equate “dark” with “dystopian.” This lead some authors to lump Harry Potter and Graveyard Book in with Hunger Games as “dark” books, while others focused on dystopias specifically. It’s a [...]

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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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Trella is a scrub, a denizen of the cramped, joyless lower levels whose job is to keep Inside clean for the wealthy Uppers. When her friend Cog introduces her to a guy who claims to know the location of the legendary Gateway to Outside, she gets involved despite herself and ends up starting a rebellion. [...]

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Incarceron is the ultimate prison: no way in, no way out. It was designed long ago to prove that even the dregs of humanity could create a paradise if properly managed, but the AI that manages the prison became sentient and turned it into a hell. Finn was born full-grown in Incarceron and remembers nothing [...]

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Sorry it’s been awhile. Fortunately the 7th grade trip to New York was not apocalyptic in the slightest. Anyway, speaking of New York, it’s the setting of today’s old-school apocalypse! In the future, everyone lives in vast suburban Tracts in little boxes made of ticky-tacky. All Cities have been evacuated and sealed, deemed too filthy [...]

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