As the world ends, families come together.

It's amazing how life can change in an instant. Forgetting to check your blind spot while driving, or carelessly mowing the yard, can have consequences that last forever. Lightning strikes cause forest fires that decimate hundreds of acres, and tornadoes can flatten towns in a matter of minutes.

In Susan Beth Pfeffer's Life as We Knew It, Miranda is an eyewitness as one of these events happens. It's been the most talked about astronomical event in a generation: an asteroid is about to hit the moon, and it's large enough to be seen with just a normal pair of binoculars. All the new stations have been bringing astronomers on to talk about it, and Miranda's teachers have been trying to elbow moon-related topics into their lesson plans.

But no one could have expected that the astronomers would be so wrong. No one knew that the asteroid would be orders of magnitude more dense than anything they'd ever seen before. So when that huge piece of space debris hit the moon, it didn't just put on a show for the amateur stargazer. The asteroid hit with such tremendous force, in fact, that it moved the moon visibly closer.

With the increased gravitational pull of the moon on the Earth, the planet is thrown into chaos. The tides rise higher than even the worst tsunamis, literally wiping island nations off the map. Earthquakes strike areas that have weak fault lines, but haven't shaken in centuries. Satellites are disabled, and the worldwide information grid is shut down.

Underneath all of those worldwide crises, there are the day to day problems of living in a world turned on its head. Miranda is a high school girl, who lives with her mother and younger brother in northern Pennsylvania. She has most of the normal high school girl problems: a mother who pushes the schoolwork, friends who are drifting away, an ankle injury that cut short her dreams of figure skating. Like most girls, she was pretty unremarkable, and the journal that she kept only reinforced it.

But as the world crumbles around her, the journal that she's keeping becomes more and more compelling. Public utilities stop working, school is cancelled, and their well runs dry. With the lack of satellites the television quickly becomes channel after channel of emergency signals, and the radio stations soon fade out.As winter begins months early, and both food and fuel begin to run out, it will be all that the family can do to stay together and stay alive.

Unlike so many of the young adult books I've read lately, I truly like Miranda. She's far from perfect, and since it's her journal everything we see is through her eyes, but she is absolutely the most relatable character I've come across in YA in a long time. She fights with her mother over silly things, she resents both the freedoms that her older brother receives and the special treatment of her younger brother. She's a fairly capable, independent young lady, but still mourns the loss of her friends, whether physical or emotional. She worries about her father and his new family, and her sister or brother-to-be. She does the best she can in the situation that she's found herself, and few readers could honestly say they would do better.

Life as We Knew It is a refreshing take on the young adult dystopian novel, without the tired love triangles and created drama that have become hallmarks of the genre. 

Highs: Watching a family try to pull together in a crisis, even when it's hard, is always uplifting.

Lows: I never like books with unreliable narrators, and a few scene might not have happened quite as Miranda writes them, but for the most part it's minimal.

Verdict: Different enough to stand out in a field flooded with dystopian fiction, LIfe as We Knew It is a wonderful, realistic look at a family in crisis.

Further Reading: The Dead and Gone, The Book Thief, Shades of Grey, Under a Graveyard Sky

Religion meets dictatorship in a fantastic adult dystopia

Most of the future dystopias of modern literature seem to follow the communist Russia path. Religion is nonexistant, there’s generally a personality cult around the leader, and the revolution that led to the current situation happened so long ago that no one remembers firsthand how life was before.

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, reverses all of these common themes. Offred, our narrator, still remembers life before the revolution, and the descent from a modern society to the conditions as they are now. She remembers the day the military showed up at her office and her boss was forced to fire everyone. She remembers the day her bank card stopped working and all of her assets moved into her husband’s name. She remembers how quickly her husband seemed to enjoy the power that the new laws gave him, and the benevolent protector role he assumed.

She remembers the failed, last-ditch effort of her family to escape the country, where she watched her husband be shot and her daughter be taken away from her.

This is also a religious dictatorship. Whatever biological or chemical warfare was used during the war before the revolution, it has left the people nearly unable to conceive or carry a healthy child to term. This revolution and the society that was formed under it is based off of corrupted Christian bible scripture. Women are subservient to men in every way. The only reason for many women’s lives, known as Handmaids, is to be breeding stock for the upper class or more important men, with the barren but obedient women known as Marthas, working as servants in their households.

After the revolution, couples in traditional Christian families were allowed to stay in their family units, especially if they already had children. Second marriages, however, went against the new interpretation of God’s wishes and were voided. Children from these unions were taken away to be raised by proper families, but the women had value as well, since they’ve been proven to be able to have a child.

Proven fertile by these illegitimate children, they were given a choice: become a Handmaid or become an Unwoman. Handmaids are given to important, high-ranking men whose wives have been unable to provide them children (because it’s blasphemous to suggest that it might be the man who is infertile). The other option was to be classified as an Unwoman. This is the fate reserved for the most disobedient women, as well as those who were unable to bear children, having been sterilized or beyond childbearing years before the revolution. All Unwomen are taken to what is essentially a death camp, have their hair (and symbol of femininity) shaven, and forced into hard labor.

Of course, no matter the reeducation given, there will always be dissidents. New people are regularly featured hanging from The Wall with their crime emblazoned on their chest. Crimes range from Homosexuality to Judaism to Reading. Mandatory attendance at hangings, stonings, weddings, and births are the main entertainment for the masses, along with religious ‘study’ and prayer.

The story of The Handmaid’s Tale follows Offred, as she learns that perhaps the government does not have as tight control over the country as it seems, and she remembers more and more about her life before, that she’s tried to forget.

As amazing as this book is, along with all of Atwood’s novels, I do have a problem with the author herself. She absolutely insists, even in her later novels that do have a technological aspect to them, that her works only be classified under ‘speculative fiction.’ She sees science fiction and fantasy to be the ghetto of the fiction genre and wants no part of it. This type of literary snobbery has crushed the confidence of many a genre writer in college or at workshops. Someday, perhaps, genre fiction will be welcome outside of Clarion, but not while people like Atwood are in charge.

Beyond that small personal problem, however, The Handmaid's Tale is an amazingly well-written, thought-provoking story with a fascinating world, and it's an absolute pleasure to read.

Highs: Top notch writing quality, truly thought-provoking

Lows: The appendix, while helping to give the story perspective, also raises more questions than it resolves

Verdict: If a high school or college teacher didn't make you read it, seek it out on your own

Further Reading: Oryx and Crake, Shadow of the Wind

A bittersweet ending to a brutal trilogy

Note:  Mockingjay is the sequel to Chasing Fire.  Therefore, this review WILL contain spoilers for both  The Hunger Games and Chasing Fire.  If you haven’t read it already, check out my review of The Hunger Games here and Chasing Fire here.  Otherwise, read on!

This is what happens when you challenge evil dictators...

Note:  Chasing Fire is the sequel to The Hunger Games.  Therefore, this review WILL contain spoilers for The Hunger Games.  If you haven’t read it already, check out my review here.  Otherwise, read on!

Dystopian Teens...Are There Any Other Kind?

Dystopian stories seem to hit a special chord with teens.  At that age, it feels like you can’t make any real difference in the world, against rules that aren’t always fair.  the difference between adult dystopian novels and teen dystopian novels, however, is the ending.  In Brave New World or 1984, there is a bleak outlook, and the establishment always wins.  In YA or Teen novels, however, there tends to be a ray of hope.

Such is the case in The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins.  This book is one of a trend of new YA and teen books with a strong female main character.  Like the girl in Graceling, Katniss has no interest in settling down and having a family.  On the contrary, she dreads the idea of having a child that would be a victim of the Hunger Games.  Her father died years ago, and as main provider and protector for the family, she had to grow up fast to take care of her younger sister Prim.  And when Prim is selected for the Games, she goes in her place.

Like many other books, this story shows what people will do when forced into terrible situations.  While some of the other children in the games train for this, and see it as a point of pride to go, many others are just as scared and unprepared as Katniss and her fellow tribute Peeta.  Alliances are forged, and broken, as the tributes are eliminated.

What this book also has, though, is a very interesting view on how the media changes the perceptions of the people watching it.  Katness and Peeta’s guides through all of this choose their dress, coach them on their interactions with each other, and do everything they can to get the audience to like them, and send them little bits of help along the way.  It’s a fairly interesting little look into the world of spin doctors, image consultants, and public perception.

In an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, Collins revealed that her idea for the world came from a late night channel surfing.  She was flipping between war coverage and a reality show:  “I was tired, and the lines began to blur in this very unsettling way.”  This book certainly shows how the media and creative editing can change perceptions of a live televised event, and perhaps shows the readers to look closer at what they’re being shown.

Highs:  The interaction between the main characters and the supporting cast; strong female characters

Lows:  long internal monologues could be tedious for some

Verdict:  Very much worth the read, and great setup for the rest of the series

Further Reading:  Catching Fire, Battle Royale