The order of the world is falling apart. The things we once relied on are no longer trustworthy, and it’s up to us to fix it.
That’s either the plot of the latest YA novel or the sensation of being a teenager who has realized that not all of the adults in their lives have their best interests at heart and that their parents, teachers, and government may not have as much power to keep them safe as they previously believed.
Researchers, publishers, writers, and educators have considered the appeal of these fictional worlds to teens, and a book-centered podcast has most recently addressed this issue.
Fully Booked Podcast Considers The Worlds Teens Love
Fully Booked, a podcast covering books and everything we love about them, turned the page on teen dystopian novels this week.
These books can be so popular that they can pull in teens who normally don’t like to read much, and many of the series even become popular with adults. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Divergent by Veronica Roth, The Maze Runner by James Dashner, The Giver by Lois Lowry, and Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, as well as the further books in each series, all open up worlds where teens face challenges that go beyond the ones in real life — and yet in a way, they also parallel teens’ real-life struggles.
The latest episode of the podcast addressed several of the appeals, including adults too “blinded by fear” to handle the problems of society, leaving kids to fix it instead; love triangles and romance subplots; totalitarian regimes; and the good intentions that are often originally behind a massive social change that ends up putting the world in peril.
Teens In Dystopian Novels Have Massive Responsibility
In these novels, kids tend to be thrust into the task of shutting down an evil government, putting an end to such evils as forcing children to fight to the death for entertainment or imposing mind-altering surgeries on children against their wills.
In real life, the dilemmas teens face — at least that adults can see — are more in the realm of math tests and fighting with parents over curfews. Teens see it differently though. As one teen said during a discussion covered by NPR in 2018, teens have good reason to be cynical:
“To be fair, they were born into a world that their parents kind of really messed up.”
And we do see teens fighting against what they see as evil or misguided government regimes, from school walkouts over gun control and mass shootings, to forming Gay-Straight Alliance clubs at their schools, to fighting for racial justice and a stop to bullying. Granted they may perceive injustice where adults don’t, such as rules about when they can drive or buy alcohol and nicotine, but from their perspective, it’s hard to dismiss that they are fighting against external forces that control their lives.
It’s Not The End Of The World…But Maybe It Feels That Way
In a paper published in Schools Catalog Information Service in 2022, Jessica Finder addressed how dystopian literature parallels the way teens feel. She talked about the phrase, “It’s not the end of the world,” and how teens often feel things in a way so much bigger than they may look to adults from the outside.
She says these books allow teens to “play the ‘what if’ game and see the devastation through to the end.” They allow teens to consider the worst-case scenarios, such as how it might go if a real-life horror story, such as COVID-19, went to much greater extremes. She explains:
“But despite its gloomy subject matter, high school students benefit from reading dystopian texts as this genre provides them the opportunity to face their fears about the future, while offering hope for what is to come…Dystopian fiction provides readers with characters who face challenges that reflect real-world events and who can still make a difference despite these obstacles.”
Teens Are Examining Their Societies From New Viewpoints
In a dystopian novel, a teen might be considering how to view a government that forcibly categorizes her into a specific society and dictates her entire future based on the results of a brain-scanning device, or that dumps her into an arena where only the last child standing is allowed to survive.
In real life, she may be just starting to recognize flaws in how her government handles poverty, food insecurity, education, healthcare, propaganda, or any number of other issues. He’s probably (hopefully) not going to take on her real-life government in hand-to-hand combat or through espionage or sabotage.
But she might just spend the rest of her life changing the things she doesn’t like through her votes and activism, or even through more direct political activity or social projects, and dystopian novels tell her that she can do that.
