I know we’re experiencing a kind of glut in dystopian fiction these days, but I do honestly enjoy the genre when it’s done well (my go-to examples are still always going to be Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy or Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which I am teaching this fall and SUPER excited about). I look for other examples by authors I haven’t read, and The Dead Lands was one such text. I’ve never read anything by Benjamin Percy, but one of my Facebook friends […]
Crash!
I finished this book some time ago, but I was so tired of being mad about it that I have put off this review. This a garbage book, ending the series on a low note. Throughout the previous two books, the story was told through the perspective of Tris, the most special snowflake that ever snowflaked in a snowstorm. In this novel, having run the well dry of shallow drama, Roth alternates between Tris’s viewpoint and that of her boyfriend, Four. His personality is not […]
Lost in Thought
Before reading this novel, I saw two very different reviews of it. One, in Salon, favorably compared Find Me to Station Eleven and The Handmaid’s Tale. The other, from NPR, found it to be lacking and unworthy of such comparison. My opinion is that while the first half of the story does make it seem as if the novel has the potential to rank up there with esteemed dystopian fiction, the second half disappoints. Laura van den Berg is a seasoned and well regarded writer of […]
Be the Change You Wish to See in the World
The Parable of the Sower, by the brilliant Octavia Butler (author of Kindred), is a piece of dystopian fiction set in California in the 2020s. It’s not clear precisely what happened, but rule of law and access to utilities, education, and basic necessities have been severely curtailed. Our narrator is Lauren Olamina, a teenager who lives inside one of the remaining walled communities on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Lauren is a “sharer” or “feeler,” i.e., a person who has a condition called hyper empathy […]
Coming off the rails
I knew heading in that the second book in the Divergent series was kind of a train wreck, but I am a completist. I am persistent and stubborn and I was on a strong female protagonist kick! I wanted something better, but it was as bad as I had been warned. This second novel seemingly takes place immediately after Divergent ends, although it is hard to know for certain, as Roth is not very good at giving the reader a sense of the time passing. […]
Because Survival Is Insufficient
Oh God, this book….this wonderful, wonderful book. The present-day world is crumbling as a deadly flu pandemic spreads like wild-fire and kills its victims in under 48 hours. Within weeks the entirety of modern civilization has been reduced to buildings full of corpses and eternal traffic jams of driverless cars. Air travel is history, satellites go down, the internet disappears, lights go out, and the world is plunged into the literal dark ages. So why is this wonderful? Mandel takes what could be just another […]
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