Dystopian Before Dystopian Was Cool

When I was a young teacher working my way through part time teaching job looking for that full time teaching job I school hopped a lot. The first person I would get to know at each school I moved to was the librarian. At one school I was roaming the shelves looking for something to read thinking I had already read it all when I discovered a book called When the Tripods Came. I picked it up and whipped through the whole book in a day. I loved it. When I discovered that it was actually a prequel to a series that was written a good deal of time before I was in awe. And I rushed to my public library to get the rest of the series.

I LOVED these books!! They are a great gateway series to dystopian books, especially for that breed of male reader that it is sometimes hard to find books for.

I went on to discover a few other series that John Christopher had written for young readers, my other favorites being the Fireball Trilogy. It was no easy feat finding all these books to read (this was during the infancy of internet), but they were well worth the tracking down.

You can still buy the tripod books (or check them out). They are well worth the searching. And if you have a young male reader in your house I suggest you run and find a copy of The White Mountains for him to read this summer.

Just do it!