while you're ahead…

You know how sometimes you need comfort food? The cheese on toast after days of healthy salads and balanced meals… the chocolate cake after days of fruit salad…

That’s how my brain felt. I’ve been feeding it so many gorgeous theories and thoughts, we’ve been training hard my brain and I and it’s been exhilarating and exciting and enriching and all that, but yesterday I needed a rest. My brain needed cheese on toast.

I can understand it might seem strange to get a rest from reading … by reading… but it was totally indulging and so so needed. If you’ve been coming to this blog for a while you’ll know of my love for YF and especially dystopian youth fiction… I can’t help myself …. I LOVE IT. It’s pure escapism, and, generally speaking more thought provoking than you might imagine and with the necessary happy, or at least hopeful, ending to guarantee full satisfaction.

This one was ‘ok’. Of course it’s the first of a trilogy, aren’t they all these days…. – which is actually my pet hate… the second one is never as good… as for the third one… it’s rare to find authors that can keep the whole thing up for three books. But we’ll see. I’m kind of hopeful.

All the element were there: the context of a world were no girls are born for 50 years a pretty heroine, the last girl ever born, which still needs the handsome , strong but sensitive, hero to do most of the exciting work (naturally… let’s not rock the patriarchy too much, let’s not put off the male readers who might object to being saved by a female), bad adults who have seriously ruined the world through greed and power grabbing, a world in ruin, flood, bad food, super cool technology and a cliffhanger ending just to keep you wanting to get the next one when it comes out.

The story moves along nicely, the characters are intriguing and there are some interesting issues that can be raised – if one wants to be really serious about it. Gender, motherhood, relationships to name but a few. My main issue is: how ‘white’ it was… no race diversity at all and the more I think about it the more it annoys me. We live in a society that it’s not like that at all… so why making it that way? So… a little whitewashed and sanitised. Could have rocked the boat… but no. Not at all. I do think that we underestimate young people and their capacity of understanding and tackling serious issues.

Mmmhhh cheese on toast for thought.

(Gender and/or racial diversity in Youth Fiction in the last ten years… how’s that for a dissertation title?)

And now back to ‘work’…