Young Adults in Post-Apocalyptic America

Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy has hit on something.  People really like reading about teenagers sticking it to the man in a future America that is no longer America.  In a Barnes and Noble the other day a whole booth was dedicated to the Hunger Games.  With the first movie coming out in a few months who can blame them?  One of the items was a journal with "Down with the Capitol!" on the front.  I have to say it was kind of cool, if journals can be cool.

Now it seems Collins has spawned a veritable sub-genre of science fiction dystopian young adult fiction.  I've never coined a term before, so I coin it SFDYAF (pronounced "Sphid-yaf").  I'm almost positive it will catch on.

Anyway, more books are popping up in the SFDYAF category.  As I write my wife is reading Marie Lu's Legend.  I haven't gotten to that one yet, but I did recently finish Veronica Roth's Divergent.  I can't say that I enjoyed it as much as The Hunger Games, nor was it as crisply and economically written.  But I still enjoyed it.

Here's the premise:  It's Chicago, sometime in the future.  There is no United States, and the city (which is largely abandoned and falling apart) is surrounded by a fence, though it is unclear what the fence is actually for.  But this is but one detail that I'm sure will be resolved further in the trilogy.  Yes, it appears that SFDYAF books come in threes.  The city is divided into five factions, each of which are united around a specific virtue they believe is necessary for peace.  These five factions are Amity, Erudite, Candor, Abnegation, and Dauntless.

When Beatrice, our heroine, comes of age and must choose her faction for life she leaves Abnegation, her family's faction, for Dauntless.  But before I give too much away of the plot, I merely note two central points.  First, Beatrice doesn't exactly fit into any faction, which she finds is quite a sticky place to find oneself.  Second, things aren't as peaceful between the factions as they seem.

I hope Chicago doesn't turn into the city of Divergent (though the zip line from the top of the Hancock Tower would be cool), but I am looking forward to the next book in the series.  Unless, that is, SFDYAF prophecies turn true and I have to fight off monsters and totalitarian governments in the mean time.