Dystopias for Teens: My Thoughts

This article had many interesting points and ideas but I chose to elaborate on this excerpt:

"Dystopian fiction may be the only genre written for children that’s routinely less didactic than its adult counterpart. It’s not about persuading the reader to stop something terrible from happening—it’s about what’s happening, right this minute, in the stormy psyche of the adolescent reader."

I think all teenagers should read dystopias especially after reading Brave New World and The Handmaids Tale. These two dystopias don't seem entirely too didactic to me and do evoke a "stormy" psyche in the reader - in The Handmaid's Tale, feeling for Offred as she explains in elaborate and wrenching metaphors about her emotional wants and losses stemming from her family, and in Brave New World - Our shifted sympathies from Bernard, The Black Sheep, to John, the black cat among sheep, and how we come to realize the World State is just a fancy lie hidden by illusions.

I think the Teen Dystopias is a genre specifically it's own because not many teenagers, unless it's for an AP English class, will pick up The Handmaids Tale because the question comes up how can I relate to a married woman who lost her husband and child? Or Brave New World and how they implement stability, identity, and community to their world? The only stability I seek is stability of my math grades at school. Despite this, I found myself deeply engrossed in these Dystopia's because at first even though I couldn't really relate to them, as I read them and analyzed them, realized that I could relate in some shape or form and I appreciated the intellectual gain I obtained from them. These novels show what direction society can take if certain situations keep going they way they are. However, they may seem a bit exaggerated in their likelihood however it doesn't bring down the overall enjoyment of reading the books.

Classic Dystopia's like the Handmaids Tale and Brave New World should be introduced first because of the bare and stripped nature of the books. That's what we need to be reading nowadays. Dystopoian Fiction like the Hunger Game is clouded by the glam and glitz of a free wardrobe and scrumtious food to the kids playing the violent games. In a review of The Hunger Games, the article states,

"As a tool of practical propaganda, the games don’t make much sense. They lack that essential quality of the totalitarian spectacle: ideological coherence. You don’t demoralize and dehumanize a subject people by turning them into celebrities and coaching them on how to craft an appealing persona for a mass audience."

I haven't read the book but I would think that If I can't get a deeper, muilti-layered lesson or message out of it, then it is not a Dystopia I would want to read my first time around. I'm not saying all Dystopia Fiction is like that (let's hope not) but I rather stick to the originals being introudced first instead of telling your English class to get a copy of The Hunger Games and analyze it as a Dystopia.