The World That Changed Everything There is a before and after Harry Potter in the history of children’s literature and popular fiction, and twenty-five years of distance have only clarified how extraordinary the achievement of the first novel really is. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone does not merely introduce a magical world – it…
The Novel That Launched a Major Voice John Green’s debut novel won the Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature when it was published in 2005, and it has never gone out of print. Looking for Alaska is a boarding school novel, a friendship story, and a meditation on mortality, all compressed into 221…
Thomas arrives in the Glade with no memory of who he is or why he was sent there. The Glade is a self-sustaining enclosure whose outer walls open each day onto a shifting stone Maze — a structure that has been running since before any of the current residents arrived, and which no one has…
Jonas lives in a Community that has eliminated war, pain, hunger, and fear through a system called Sameness — the eradication of color, climate variation, and choice. At twelve, he is selected to be the next Receiver of Memory, the single person who bears the community’s entire history of experience so that the governing Elders…
The Faction System: Worldbuilding with Intent Veronica Roth published Divergent in 2011, in the immediate wake of The Hunger Games, and comparisons were inevitable and not entirely fair. Where Collins built a world rooted in political economy and media spectacle, Roth constructed something more psychological: a Chicago divided into five factions defined by virtue –…
How to Write About Dying Without Sentimentality John Green opens The Fault in Our Stars with a disarmingly self-aware sentence: “I am not going to tell you our love story is unique or particularly special, or that it changed the world. I’m going to tell you what happened, which is what I do.” This is…
The World That Changed Everything There is a before and after Harry Potter in the history of children’s literature and popular fiction, and twenty-five years of distance have only clarified how extraordinary the achievement of the first novel really is. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone does not merely introduce a magical world – it…
A Dystopia Built on Real Fear Suzanne Collins did not invent the dystopia, but she made it feel newly urgent. The Hunger Games drops readers into Panem – a future North America divided into twelve districts kept in grinding poverty by a Capitol that demands annual tribute in the cruelest form imaginable: two children, selected…
Four Retirees and a Body Richard Osman is a British television presenter who wrote The Thursday Murder Club while between commitments, fully expecting, he has said, that it would sell modestly and be forgotten. It became one of the bestselling British novels of the past decade, launched a series, and was adapted for film. The…
Trivandrum Beach Parent Group Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies announces its tonal sophistication in its first pages: the novel is told partly through transcripts of police interviews with parents from a school’s kindergarten cohort, conducted after something terrible has happened at the school’s trivia night fundraiser. We don’t know what happened for most of the…