What’s expected when one goes to pick up a novel categorized under dystopia? Well, by definition, dystopia means a society characterized by human misery, oppression, disease, and overcrowding. Using this, it’s safe to assume a reader is expecting to find waiting for them a futuristic society with a controlling government and restricting rules. But is this exactly what you get?
Authors Scott Westerfeld, Ally Condie, and Lauren Oliver all decided to take a swing at writing a teen dystopian novel. As a group, Westerfeld’s Uglies, Condie’s Crossed, and Oliver’s Delirium, represent the dystopian genre well. They all have strong female leads that throughout the novel start to discover exactly what the cost is to live in a quote on quote “perfect society”. Whether they’re forced to disobey their controlling government or do so because of found love, each girl comes to find that they no longer want anything to do with their safe life and will do anything to obtain their freedom. But is this all you get when you read one of these novels? A bunch of books about teenagers rebelling against unwanted rules and regulations? Hopefully not, since after a while their anguish must get old. So exactly how well do these books stand on their own; what makes them different from the others in their genre?
Westerfeld starts off his dystopian series with Uglies. He writes about a society where everyone is turned pretty at the age of sixteen, and allowed to live the dream in New Pretty Town – partying, drinking, and hanging out with friends 24/7. And everyone below that age is left across the river in Uglyville, counting down the days until they are given the operation to be pretty. Tally Youngblood is no different. She can’t wait to be pretty. But when one of her friends runs away from the town, to the mysterious civilization of the New Smokes, where everyone stays Ugly, Tally is left to deal with the consequences. This is where Westerfeld’s novel starts to branch off from the others in this genre: Tally doesn’t want to rebel against her society. She wants to be turned pretty, to have the life she’s been promised. When her friend Shay asks her to come with her, Tally replies with “I don’t want to be ugly all my life. I want those perfect eyes and lips, and for everyone to look at me and gasp” (Westerfeld 92). So when Shay runs away, the people in Special Circumstances makes Tally go to the New Smokes to find her. Despite being conflicted with the thought of betraying her friend, Tally goes anyways, because it’s either that or never turn pretty. Uglies is a nice breath of fresh air from all the other novels with girls rebelling because they want to be with the one they love. Tally’s mind set changes because she finds out that the operation not only changes your face, but it changes the way you think, too. Yeah, she does fall in love, too. But he’s just a side note in the plot. So that doesn’t count.
Crossed is the second book in Ally Condie’s Matched trilogy. It follows Cassia as she turns away from her perfect life of having everything picked out for her: her job, where she lives, and who she marries. Cassia gets herself sent off to the war in the Outer Provinces (where the society sends its unwanted members to get killed by the enemy) in search of her beloved Kai. Kai isn’t Cassia’s match, though. Her childhood friend Xander is. And Kai is even an Aberration, someone who never had the chance to be matched. But Cassia fell in love with him anyways, fell in love with how he knew how to write, his mysterious past living in the Outer Provinces, and how he was the one thing that wasn’t picked out for her by the Society. But when they take him away to “fight” in the war, Cassia manages to find a way to chase after him. They both end up meeting up after going through adventures of their own, and decide to travel together to find the mysterious Rebellion that they’ve each heard about. While Crossed is well written, and gives you the viewpoint of both Cassia and Kai, it’s generic. Cassia rebels because she wants to be with Kai, to be given the option to choose. Kai is that dark soul with a mysterious past, that wants nothing more than for Cassia to be safe. And then there is Cassia’s actual match, Xander, who makes the third point yet another love triangle. Cassia says about her friend “I love Xander in ways that are perhaps more complicated than I first expected” (Condie 473 of 4176)*. Insert groan from readers here. But wait! Don’t mark this novel off your list yet, because as Kirkus Review says “Condie’s [triangle] is complicated and particularly human, involving real emotional scars.” Crossed’s plot may be your generic dystopian novel / love story, but Cassia’s conflictions are understandable. She loves Xander because he’s her best friend, and she wants to rebel because it’s the only chance that she’ll be with Kai.
The last novel in this review is Lauren Oliver’s Delirium. Delirium is about Lena, who lives in a futuristic America where love has been classified as a disease. Everyone at the age of 18 is given an operation that cures them of this disease, but as Lena comes to realize, also leaves them completely void of any emotions needed for a healthy relationship. This government is also one that chooses your job, your home, and who you marry for you. And Lena is yet another teenager who wants this life, but everything starts to unravel when she meets Alex. From the beginning she knows there is something different about Alex, and throughout the novel she learns that he is from the Wilds, the part of the country that isn’t controlled by the government. So, this means that Alex isn’t cured, which enables the two of them to fall in love. Lena realizes that although the chances of them being able to end up together is very slim, what with the government thinking Alex is cured and what not, she still dares to hope that they’ll be able to run away together. “He who leaps for the sky may fall, it’s true. But he may also fly” (Oliver 5420 of 6139)*.While summarizing the plot makes it sound just like other dystopian novels, it’s really not. Delirium shows the downfall of a society. The country has to ration out electricity, and having a car is considered a luxury. In this novel, there are no hover cars, or medicines that can be given to erase your memories of the past few hours. Instead, Delirium gives you another option, where maybe in fact life doesn’t get better, the only thing that changes is that we are, in their case, forced to not care.
While it’s correct to guess that if you read a bunch of books from the same genre, after a while you’ll find a pattern and make connections between the different books. But it wouldn’t be correct to assume that they’re all the same. Each novel is written by a different author, and each has their own idea of how the world will turn out in the next few hundred years. Uglies, Crossed, and Delirium, all maybe be a part of the same genre, but they aren’t to be considered pretty much the same book.
*these locations are based on the Kindle editions
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