The Grace Year by Kim Liggett

Title: The Grace Year

Author: Kim Liggett

Genre: Young Adult

In this dystopian YA tale, all the girls in Garner Country must take part in The Grace Year. However, no one is allowed to talk about it or what happens during it. All they know is that the girls leave the village for a year with their magic and return without it, ready for marriage...if they return at all. 16 year old Tierney wants a life where she isn't someone's property and where the girls aren't always pitting themselves against each other. When it's time for her Grace Year, she realizes that what she was told to fear isn't what she should actually fear.
This book felt like the perfect combination of The Handmaid's Tale and The Salem Witch Trials. There's suspense, fear, survival, and female empowerment all rolled up into one amazing book. Easily the best book I've read this year!

- Megan

Check out  The Grace Year by Kim Liggett @ the library!

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

Title: The Dreamers

Author: Karen Thompson Walker

Genre: Science Fiction, Dystopian Fiction

In a small town in southern California, a student comes home late from a party and falls asleep... but does not wake up. Then a few more students catch this mysterious illness and others outside of the college do, too. What follows is the stories of those who dream and those who are awake, and the stories that entertwine. Fans of Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven will enjoy this one. 

- Elizabeth

Check out The Dreamers @ the library.

Vox by Christina Dalcher

Title: Vox

Author: Christina Dalcher

Genre: Science Fiction, Dystopian

Think of the number of words  you say in a given day. How would having a limit affect how you use them? In Christina Dalcher's book, Vox, America's latest political regime has decreed that females are not allowed more than 100 words per day - a far cry from the average 16,000 words they were used to. Add to that, women no longer have the same rights as men. Girls are no longer taught the same subjects. The new dichotomy for the sexes is clear, cold, and unforgiving. 

For Dr. Jean McClellan, a woman who has spent her life researching a cure for brain/speech issues, abiding by these new rules is especially hard. She and her fellow scientists were close to a cure, but she was forced to abandon her work - until the brother of the religious leader touting the changes has a problem with being able to talk. 

Will Jean help the man who is responsible for so much pain?  Can she find her voice and a voice for the rest of the female nation before it is silenced altogether? Pick up Vox at your local library to see.

I would recommend this to anyone who likes novels about dystopian futures - and especially for those who enjoyed Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. 

- Sarah R.

Check out Vox @ the library.

The Circle by Dave Eggers

Title: The Circle

Author: Dave Eggers

Genre: Fiction, Technological Dystopian

The Circle by Dave Eggers is the tale of social media at its most heinous. Imagine your favorite social media platform magnified; it keeps an eye on you at all times, watches your every move, and somehow is still fully endorsed by most of the public. Main character Mae takes a job at The Circle and is quickly swept up in the social media tornado. The Circle is a novel that really makes you think about how entwined social media is in your life, and at what point does it become too involved. Fans of dystopian fiction and technology would enjoy this  look at what could happen if too much privacy is willingly given away.

- Jamie

Check out The Circle @ the library.

Wool by Hugh Howey

Title: Wool

Author: Hugh Howey

Genre: Science Fiction / Dystopian

Originally self-published on Amazon as a short novellette, Wool quickly became an internet sensation. Howey's fans urged him to write more, which led him to publish 4 additional short stories in quick succession throughout the next six months. This version of Wool is a compilation of these first 5 stories into a novel format and is the first book in the Silo trilogy.

Wool takes place in a future where an unknown catastrophe forced everyone to live underground in structures called silos. The top floor has a large video view of the outside world, and it's an ugly, beige wasteland. Stories of blue skies, green grass, and animals like elephants are considered children's fables. Anyone who expresses a desire to go outside has their wishes granted and is never heard from again. When Holston's wife Allison makes a discovery on the silo's computer system, she starts acting strange and says that she wants to go outside. Three years after she left, Holston thinks Allison was on to something and that there may be more to the outdoors than what they have been told...

- Sarah P.

Check out Wool @ the library.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Published in the age of Ebola, SARS, swine flu, bird flu and measles, Station Eleven is a book in step with the current fears of reasonable people. Emily St. John Mandel has written a thoughtful and plausible dystopia in which nearly the entire population of the world is wiped out by a flu pandemic.   

The story begins in present day Toronto, where an unsuspecting audience watches an unsuspecting cast in a production of King Lear. When these people leave the shelter of the theater, they unknowingly enter a world that has been ravaged by the Georgian Flu in the space of a few hours, a world where people die suddenly -- in their cars, in planes, buses and trains, on sidewalks and streets. The few pockets of survivors are those who are sheltered in isolation at home for weeks until the televised news went off the air and they exhausted their supply of food and water. Then they start walking, for what purpose they are unsure. Some twenty years later, many of the survivors have banded into widely scattered tribes, troupes, communities and cults. The Traveling Symphony is a group of musicians and actors who travel up and down the eastern coast of Lake Michigan performing Shakespeare and classical music. One of their members, Kirsten, was a child actress in the King Lear production. She carries with her some possessions from her previous life, including a few graphic novels entitled Station Eleven. As the story toggles between pre-pandemic and post-pandemic times, the books and some other objects connect the past to the present. The new world is dangerous and filled with hardships. People survive by scavenging from abandoned houses and stores, hunting wildlife and stealing from one another. Mistrust is the prevailing attitude and with good reason. The Georgian flu, like flus and plagues before it, was an equal opportunity disease, striking down rich and poor, young and old alike.  But in the post-pandemic world, survival of the fittest is the rule of life. After a particularly difficult journey, the Symphony reaches its destination and finds a small glimmer of hope for the future.  Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is ultimately a tale of the survival of ordinary people who adapt to extraordinary circumstances. 

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

What would happen if the rotation of the Earth slowed down, stretching the days by minutes, then hours?  If a single day grew to over 50 hours long?

Julia is 11 years old when the slowing begins.  At first, the change is hardly noticeable - the streetlights come on too early, the sun sets a bit later than it should.  But then the birds begin to die - gravity is stronger, and airborne things have a harder time staying airborne.  First the grass dies, then the trees - with 20, then 30 hours of sun, followed by the long dark of night, crops cannot grow without greenhouses and sunlamps.  The magnetic field of the Earth disturbed, the whales can no longer navigate, and there are mass beachings.

As the rotation disintegrates, so does everyday life.  Julia's best friend Hannah, a Mormon, moves to Utah to wait for the end with her family.  Her science teacher vanishes, and her piano teacher, always a free spirit, is suddenly distrusted by Julia's mom.  People stockpile huge amounts of canned food and water.  Her parents drift apart, her mother affected by a mysterious illness simply called The Syndrome.  And as society splits between clock time and real time, the 24-hour day implemented by the government makes strangers of friends and neighbors.  Eerie, unsettling, and utterly compelling, this perfectly paced dystopian novel is one of this summer's must-reads!

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan

When Hannah Payne wakes up, she is Red.  In a not-too-distant future United States where church and state are no longer separate, convicted felons are no longer incarcerated, but melachromed - injected with a virus that color-codes their skin depending on their crime - and then set free to live in a society that hates and fears them.  Hannah has been convicted of murder.  Her victim?  Her unborn child.  Hannah's refusal to reveal the father - United States Secretary of Faith, and married man, Aiden Dale - is an act of fierce love and devotion and results in an unusually harsh sentence of 16 years as a Chrome.  A dystopian retelling of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic novel The Scarlet Letter, When She Woke is a heart-wrenching tale that unflinchingly explores faith, spirituality, love and the deepest reserves of human strength, kindness, and compassion.

Things We Didn't See Coming by Steven Amsterdam

What would the world be like if the Y2K disaster had happened on January 1, 2000, as some expected? Things We Didn't See Coming is a collection of related short stories which offer one view, as a young man makes his way through a dystopian future. As the years go by, the problems people face change and the unnamed protagonist, as he moves about the country, changes his strategies for survival.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

I am not a gamer at all but I loved reading about Parcival and his friends navigate an online adventure filled with eighties pop culture references left behind by a reclusive billionaire.  The game takes place in the OASIS, an online virtual reality where most of the population now spends their time because the real world has become a very depressing place.  The reward is the fortune the billionaire has left behind.  Will Parcival reach Halliday’s egg before the Sixers?  Read Ready Player One and find out!