A sleepy California town is enclosed in a mysterious barrier at the same instant that, pop! Everyone over the age of 14 vanishes. And some kids get psychic powers. (Actually, some got their powers several months before the pop - no word yet on why.) And animals mutate ( Read more... )

I found a fascinating blog entry by Rahul Kanakia, the guy who wrote the bedbugs-and-squatters story, with a gay teenage Indian hero (yay!), for Diverse Energies. (I see elsewhere on the site that "I'm currently shopping a gay-themed YA novel -- set in a dystopian Washington, D.C. -- to agents." I hope it sells. Depressing or not, I would read it ( Read more... )

An anthology of dystopian YA short stories with a focus on diversity, ie, most of the protagonists are not white ( Read more... )

Lugh got born first. On Midwinter Day when the sun hangs low in the sky.

Then me. Two hours later.

That pretty much says it all.

Lugh goes first, always first, an I follow on behind.

An that’s fine. That’s right. That’s how it’s meant to be.While there are eventually entire paragraphs, the whole book is like this. It’s narrated by the ( Read more... )

A mediocre YA novel about the eruption of the supervolcano at Yellowstone which ticks off all the most clichéd tropes of the apocalypse novel as if working from a list: immediate formation of unashamed cannibal rape gangs, check; instant descent into suspicion and savagery by most people even if they’re not cannibal rapists, check; hero’s search ( Read more... )

I realized while chatting with
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I was recently pointed to a new YA dystopia straight out of the YA dystopia generator.

Caffeine has been banned and the government controls water.I have no idea what that book is actually like (unfortunately, it looks like it isn't a comedy) but my problem with a lot of recent YA dystopias is that they do didacticism badly: bluntly, to the ( Read more... )

There are some rather interesting discrepancies between the votes in general, and the votes of sponsors who are actually ponying up some cash. In overall totals, we have Bumped (teen pregnancy is bad) in the lead, followed by VI (Sexteen) (teenage girls having sex is bad), and then Divergent (basing society on a personality quiz is bad ( Read more... )

Several of you suggested that I hold a poll so you could vote for me to read and review a YA dystopian novel, and sponsor me to do so to raise money for The Virginia Avenue Project. (Making Los Angeles less dystopic since 1992 ( Read more... )

I read this while I was at horse camp, where I found it on the shelf and picked it up because I had enjoyed some of Friesner’s comic fantasy when I was in high school. (She is probably best-known for the “Chicks in Chained Mail
( Read more... )