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Riot Recommendation

Riot Recommendation: Dystopian Coming of Age Stories

Rebecca Joines Schinsky

Chief of Staff

Rebecca Joines Schinsky is the executive director of product and ecommerce at Riot New Media Group. She co-hosts All the Books! and the Book Riot Podcast. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaschinsky.

taken erin bowmanThis installment of the Riot Recommendation is sponsored by Taken by Erin Bowman.

There are no men in Claysoot.

At midnight on every boy’s eighteenth birthday, the ground shakes, the wind howls, a blinding light descends…and the boy is gone.

The villagers call it the Heist.

Gray Weathersby is prepared to meet his fate–until he finds a strange note from his mother and starts to question everything he’s been raised to accept. Desperate for the truth, Gray takes his chances and climbs over the wall that surrounds Claysoot, which no one has ever crossed and survived. On the other side is a world unlike anything Gray believed possible. And the answers he finds there could be deadly.

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You know how the classic coming of age story goes. Boy or girl grows up, goes out into the world, encounters challenges, and tries to make sense of it all. But dystopian coming of age stories? They’re something else. Boy or girl grows up, realizes the world isn’t at all what they thought it was, and struggles to survive in their new reality. The stakes are high and the emotion higher. As if being a teenager isn’t hard enough?!

In today’s Riot Recommendation, we want to know: what are your favorite stories about young people coming of age in dystopian worlds?

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