Fictional dystopias don’t create fear as much as they validate it. And isn’t that what we want as young people and even later as adults? To be validated, whether in our fears, our pain, or our happiness? Young Adult books let us explore, without the threat of rejection, what we most wish to understand or even accept, ourselves.
In this episode, we explore a new era of female protagonists and the dystopian world in which they exist. Authors Veronica Roth and Mindy McGinnis create stories that challenge the conventional role of young female characters in YA literature and set forth to expose how heroines see the world.