Reddit reviews Into the Forest
We found 4 Reddit comments about Into the Forest. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Reddit reviews Into the ForestWe found 4 Reddit comments about Into the Forest. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
I read a LOT and am always trying to find new collapse fiction. Whenever I see these kind of threads they always list the same 5 novels. To be fair that is because they are great books. Here is a list full of novels you might not know about. Anything you find here is worth reading. Even bad collapse fiction is useful because you can make mental notes of what the characters are doing wrong. I'll try to list them in rough order of best to worst.
Tunnel in the Sky By Robert Heinlein
Holding Their Own By Joe Nobody
Swan Song By Robert McCammon
A Distant Eden By Lloyd Tackitt
The Jakarta Pandemic By Steven Konkoly
77 Days in September By Ray Gorham
The Walk By Lee Goldberg
Folk of the Fringe By Orson Scott Card
World Made by Hand By James Kunstler
American Apocalypse: The Collapse Begins By Nova
Into the Forest By Jean Hegland
Year of the Flood By Margaret Atwood
Last Light By Terri Blackstock
TEOTWAKI: Beacon's Story By David Craig
The Pulse By Scott B. Williams
Grid Down Reality Bites By Bruce Buckshot Hemming
Desperate Times By Nicholas Antinozzi
Armageddon's Children By Terry Brooks
Desperate Times By Nicholas Antinozzi
I think voice and tone are the main markers of YA, and those are incredibly hard to nail down.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Ranger's Apprentice, My Sister's Keeper, Miserere, The Midwife's Apprentice, The Catcher in the Rye, the His Dark Materials trilogy, Ella Enchanted, Catherine, Called Birdy, Fangirl, the Mistborn trilogy, Girls Like Us, various Tamora Pierce books, and Incarceron are all books that could be considered YA in some markets, but not in others (some are marketed up as adult literature, others down as children's books).
If you went solely by "characters being teenagers for most of the book" to define YA, (and even threw in caveats like "coming of age" and "no explicit sex") you'd get titles like Wild Ginger, The Poisonwood Bible, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Into the Forest, or The Year of the Flood on the YA shelves, possibly disappointing a lot of people who aren't interested in such a dreary world view and often a pervading sense of melancholy (which is perhaps coming from the slower pace, even if things are happening all the time?).
Endings seem to play a role too: those adult examples were all unhappy ends that could make the characters' entire journey seem pointless. YA doesn't necessarily shy away from the unhappy ending (The Fault in Our Stars, The Girl of Fire and Thorns, and Feed come to mind), but there's always a spark of hope and the books were more upbeat up until that point.
YA doesn't necessarily shy away from cynicism or ennui and/or despair either: there was plenty of that to go around in The Hunger Games, Looking for Alaska, Graceling, Delirium, and The Archived, but those tended to be character traits coming from character voice rather than the tone of the narration itself.
Bonus MG vs YA distinction: Does he liiiiike her and maybe kiss her or marry her or are they dating or secretly lusting?
tl,dr: Gut feeling. I know it when I read it, and I don't always agree with the official designation on the spine.
Oryx and Crake is excellent, and I would recommend it to anyone. It's part of a trilogy that continues with The Year of the Flood, which covers the same time period viewed by entirely different characters (segregated lower class and a hippie-ish religious cult rather than the biotech-happy upper crust in Oryx and Crake). MaddAddam is meant to tie the two together.
Depending on what type of dystopia you're interested in, I have several recommendations:
My own post-apocalyptic novel is After The Fires Went Out: Coyote and I think it fits what you're looking for, but I'm surprisingly biased.