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Brave New Novels

December 19th, 2011
Marilyn · Staff Recommendations

It’s 2012 (almost). Do you know what your teenager is reading? If you guessed vampire love stories, you’d be behind the times. Pushing them out of their prominence are dystopian novels. Out with Twilight, in with The Hunger Games. Remember reading 1984 for school? Well, the future has evolved into mind-blowing all-out, survivor episodes from H-E-double hockey sticks like you would not believe!

First, witness twelve kids in The Hunger Games fight to the death. This is the first book of a wildly popular trilogy, and the movie comes out in March. If you like trilogies, try Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, a book that spent more than 50 weeks on the bestseller list. Everyone is ugly until they get extreme plastic surgery at sixteen years old. Divergent by Veronica Roth harkens back to Huxley’s Brave New World in that everyone has a place in society. Society is divided into five factions—and at sixteen everyone chooses his or her faction.

This generation seems hungry, ravenous even, for stories about how kids can live in a controlled, totalitarian, almost unbearable society. Is this information they need for the present, or does this speak to their fears about the time they live in? The answer is unclear. However, a nuclear arsenal of dynamic dystopian novels are exploding right about now, 2012. Welcome to the apocalypse.

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