Young Adult

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…