Book #145 of 2016: Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry (The Giver #2) Not nearly as good as The Giver, and also entirely unconnected despite being marketed as a companion novel / sequel. (I’ve been told they tie together in a later book in the series, but on their own this one and The Giver are …
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Book #116 of 2016: The Giver by Lois Lowry (The Giver #1) I remember really liking The Giver when I was growing up, but I was still a teenager at the oldest the last time I read it, so I only really had fuzzy memories of its specifics. Of course, it more than lived up …
Book #114 of 2017: The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters (The Last Policeman #1) Apocalyptic fiction and detective stories are two genres that I particularly enjoy, but I believe this is the first time I’ve ever seen them blended. The result is The Last Policeman, a novel about a detective trying to solve the …
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Book #89 of 2016: The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker A lovely coming-of-age story, set in a world where the earth’s rotation has suddenly slowed, leading to all sorts of natural and sociological problems. Although unsettling, I particularly liked the gradual way that the characters come to discriminate against anyone still trying to …
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Book #34 of 2016: Golden Son by Pierce Brown (Red Rising #2) Given their common themes of dystopian wargames and rebellion against a corrupt government, The Hunger Games remains the go-to comparison for the Red Rising series of books. But this second novel of the series deepens the plot outside of the arena far more …
Book #7 of 2016: The Shade of the Moon by Susan Beth Pfeffer (Last Survivors #4) This is the fourth (and last?) book in Pfeffer’s teens-making-poor-life-decisions-in-the-apocalypse series, and it is definitely the wildest one yet. The earlier books were tightly focused on individual families struggling to survive in a time of cataclysm; this one verges …
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Book #36 of 2020: Shade’s Children by Garth Nix Shade’s Children is really not that similar to The Hunger Games, but they both feature young people being forced to fight for their lives in a dystopian future, and I think anyone who enjoyed the one story would probably like the other as well. (A studio …
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Book #2 of 2011: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games #1) Very similar to the novel Battle Royale, which I love, except there’s much more of a focus on the kind of dystopian society that would make children fight to the death in the first place – which is definitely a rich topic …
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