Sorry folks: no deep, meaningful stuff from me tonight. I read Susan Beth Pfeffer's The Dead and the Gone recently. At first it was really creepy, then it got kind of boring, then it ended and I was disappointed. I am not a fan.
What creeped me out was that in my experience, dystopian literature takes place in some far-off future where something catastrophic happened or the current political/technological climate came into being a long time ago. The Dead and the Gone seems to be set today, and the novel starts on the day that the world-changing catastrophe happens. For this reason I found the first few chapters pretty hard (emotionally) to get through, especially after the recent events in Japan.
So, the first few chapters were very effective, but I got pretty bored after that.
I also read Laura Miller's article "Fresh Hell"* and liked what she had to say, especially about dystopian fiction mirroring the young adult's high school experience.
*Miller, Laura. 2010. Fresh Hell: What’s Behind the Boom in Dystopian Fiction for Young Readers?” The New Yorker June 14.
What creeped me out was that in my experience, dystopian literature takes place in some far-off future where something catastrophic happened or the current political/technological climate came into being a long time ago. The Dead and the Gone seems to be set today, and the novel starts on the day that the world-changing catastrophe happens. For this reason I found the first few chapters pretty hard (emotionally) to get through, especially after the recent events in Japan.
So, the first few chapters were very effective, but I got pretty bored after that.
I also read Laura Miller's article "Fresh Hell"* and liked what she had to say, especially about dystopian fiction mirroring the young adult's high school experience.
*Miller, Laura. 2010. Fresh Hell: What’s Behind the Boom in Dystopian Fiction for Young Readers?” The New Yorker June 14.
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