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Jun 2, 2011

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!

5 comments:

  1. Sounds like a great book for kids. Does it have a male protagonist?

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  2. "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." You realize you just described my son, right?! Ha ha.

    Did he tell you he devoured Rot & Ruin in ONE DAY and LOVED it?!

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  3. Anonymous9:17 AM

    Wait, someone else knows what these books ARE? In middle school, my advanced English class did a dystopian three weeks. Week one was A Wrinkle in Time, week two was the first book in this series, and week 3 was The Giver. These were my least favorites, but it was the best unit in the entire two years of the class!!! No one ever knows what I am talking about when I say "The Tripods book!"

    You just made my day!

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  4. I love these books! I haven't read the prequel, but I've read (and reread) the three main books. Definitely a great pick for a reluctant male reader.

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  5. Awesome! It's like The Diary of Pelly D and The Hollow Kingdom, which were awesome dystopian/sci-fi and paranormals (respectively) before each had its own genre boom. Too bad these (and yours) are so unknown now.

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