Dystopian Coming of Age Stories: A Reading List
This 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?!
We asked you to share your favorite stories about young people coming of age in dystopian worlds, and this is what you came up with:
The Giver series by Lois Lowry
The Uglies series by Scott Westerfield
Books of Ember series by Jeanne DuPrau
Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness
Dustlands series by Moira Young
Matched series by Allie Condie
Lunar Chronicles series by Marissa Meyer
Divergent series by Veronica Roth
Legend series by Marie Lu
Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins
Tomorrow series by John Marsden
Unwind series by Neal Shusterman
The Pure Trilogy by Julianna Baggott
Enclave by Anne Aguirre
The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Never Let Me Go by Kazou Ishiguro
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker
America Pacifica by Anna North
Emergence by David R. Palmer
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Anything we missed?
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