Dystopian teen fiction
So I've been reading the Hunger Games series (almost finished the last book!) and this week I read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.There is a film based on the book too which I intend to watch tonight.
The plotline from Amazon if anyone has never read it: I chose a deliberately vague one so as not to give certain things away!
Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were pupils at Hailsham - an idyllic establishment situated deep in the English countryside. The children there were tenderly sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe they were special, and that their personal welfare was crucial. But for what reason were they really there? It is only years later that Kathy, now aged thirty-one, finally allows herself to yield to the pull of memory. What unfolds is the haunting story of how Kathy, Ruth and Tommy slowly come to face the truth about their seemingly happy childhoods - and about their futures. Never Let Me Go is a uniquely moving novel, charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of our lives.
So yeah my mind has been very much on Dystopian teen fiction lately! So has anybody else read it? In the lecture, my tutor gave us a list of similar books which you may enjoy if you enjoyed this one. I've put them under the cut, with a brief description :)
Uglies (Scott Westerfield)-set in a future post-scarcity dystopian world in which everyone is turned "Pretty" by extreme cosmetic surgery upon reaching age 16. It tells the story of teenager Tally Youngblood who rebels against society's enforced conformity, after her new found friends Shay and David show her the downsides to becoming a "Pretty". They show Tally how being a "Pretty" can change not only your look but your personality.
The Declaration (Gemma Malley)-In year 2030, humankind found the cure to the aging process, the medicament called Longevity. Longevity prolongs one's life span to the point of no dying, and soon, the world becomes too crowded, because, in the world where no one dies, and more children are being born, there is no place for everyone to go. Therefore, in the year 2080, humankind is forced to sign The Declaration, claiming that if they take Longevity, they will have no more children.
Unwind (Neal Shusterman)-After a civil war-known as the Second Civil War or the Heartland War-is fought over abortion, a compromise was reached, allowing parents to sign an order for their children between the ages of 13 and 18 years old to be unwound-taken to "harvest camps" and having their body parts harvested for later use. The reasoning was that, since 100% (actually 99.44% taking into account the appendix and "useless" organs) was required to be used, unwinds did not technically "die", because their individual body parts lived on. In addition to unwinding, parents who are unable to raise their children to age thirteen for retroactive abortion have the option to "stork" their child by leaving it on another family's porch. If they don't get caught, the "storked" baby then becomes the other family's responsibility.
Of course, there are people who resist, and refuse not to bear children. The children of those individuals are offensively referred to as "Surplus". In some countries, the Surplus are killed the moment they are born, but in civilized Britain, they are taken away from their parents at very young age and brought to a kind of boarding school where they are taught that their very existence is a crime against Nature, and that they ought to work hard if they want to redeem for their parents' sins and become the "Valuable Asset", in which case they would be able to work for "The Legals" and be partially free.
The Knife of Never Letting Go (Patrick Ness)-Todd Hewitt is the only boy left in Prentisstown, a small settlement on New World where all boys become men at the age of 13. He begins the novel oblivious to Prentisstown’s history, having been told that all women have been killed by a ‘germ’ released by the native species on his planet known as the Spackle. As a side effect of this germ, the remaining men in Prentisstown can hear each other's thoughts, described as an ever-present cascade of ‘Noise’.
Then there are the Hunger Games which I already mentioned, and of course the Battle Royale novel.
I am certainly going to enjoy reading these books!