Dystopian futures, war-torn pasts: May's YA titles explore the darker side of humanity

Irish Times

11-05-2025

'Every year we let them herd us into their killing machine. Every year they pay no price for the slaughter. They just throw a big party and box up our bodies like presents for our families to open back home.'
Suzanne Collins
brings us back to futuristic Panem, where teenagers murdering each other is must-see television, in the latest Hunger Games instalment,
Sunrise on the Reaping
(Scholastic, £19.99).
As with her previous title, we are in prequel territory here – 24 years before Katniss Everdeen's rebellion against the wealthy, gluttonous Capitol – and attentive fans will recall how many of the details of these particular Games have already been given to us. Some plot elements are a foregone conclusion – for example, we know narrator Haymitch Abernathy will survive to adulthood to become Katniss's dissolute mentor, despite his own certainty about his fate: 'Now I mainly think about the people I love, making my death as easy as possible for them.'
But quite how it happens is still to be revealed, and the nature of Collins's propaganda-fuelled world lets her rewrite what we might think we already know in a deliciously apt way. What we've been told – what we imagine is coming – is the Capitol's version, revealed here to be 'a mind-bending realignment of events'.
This tense and thought-provoking novel shows us younger versions of several familiar characters, allowing for irony that is at times amusing (ha, that seemingly doomed crush will end in marriage!) and at times devastating (Haymitch noting in the first chapter 'I'm not a drinker myself'). It makes a bigger point about the nature of rebellions against oppressive regimes – that they are longer, harder, messier battles than we might dream of; that doing the right thing can have an impossibly high cost – without sacrificing the propulsive energy of the plot.
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Brilliantly gripping in its own right, it also serves as a bridge between the last volume – set during the 10th Hunger Games – and the original trilogy, expanding and refining our sense of this cruel and yet darkly familiar world.
There is also, as is fitting for dystopian fiction, a nod to a certain timely danger; the filmmakers who create Capitol propaganda find themselves sighing over 'the tools that were abolished and incapacitated in the past, ones deemed fated to destroy humanity because of their ability to replicate any scenario using any person'. The reference to generative AI is pointed without being overplayed, and echoed in the publisher's updated copyright reminder; as with so much of this book, the horrors referenced are an invitation to look at our own world with less blinkered eyes.
Haymitch's sense of his own doom – that unquestioning acceptance of his lot in life – is echoed in Feldspar's fervent belief she should not have survived the murder of the 'ascendant' she's been assigned to protect in Anna February's
The Hive
(Chicken House, £8.99).
The book offers another take on a bleak if plausible future, with a close eye on climate change; we learn 'the weather became too extreme for anything except the hardiest seabirds to thrive above ground', that 'only a tiny remnant of humanity was judged worthy enough to survive the scouring of the earth by storm and sea'. Chemical poisoning led to a wave of infertility, and even now the capacity to have children is a carefully controlled secret, managed by the royal family of the titular Hive.
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Against this backdrop, we have a murder mystery – the charming but temperamental Euphemie dies at the end of chapter one, and Feldspar, her 'shield' from birth, is suspected of killing her. Her sole ally is the black sheep of the royal family, Niko, who's rumoured to be an expert in the dark arts; their joint investigation unfurls more than a few family secrets while the body count rises. He sees the system more clearly than the indoctrinated Feldspar, and serves neatly as an explainer of this world, but as the story progresses, she develops her own critique of the deeply dysfunctional society and its treatment of so many people as disposable. An intriguing, satisfying page-turner.
The highly accomplished and versatile Geraldine McCaughrean is on form in her latest novel,
Under A Fire-Red Sky
(Usborne, £8.99), drawing on her father's experience as a firefighter in the second World War. As the threat to London intensifies, young people are evacuated to the countryside via train – but four teenagers decide to jump off instead. Some return home, with a 'sufficiently good lie' about staying in order to get extra coaching 'to try for university' (a suitable excuse in a home where 'the very word 'university' would delight her mother'); others don't have much of a home to return to.
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'As if the matter of the war had been put into a drawer for safe keeping', the unlikely friends begin 'expeditions' to various historical locations: 'Best to see the Past now, then. The Past will never stop existing, but the Present might fall into the Thames and drown.'
What seems like a slightly contrived premise at first morphs into genuine friendship against a backdrop of conflict and uncertainty, with characters hoping 'nothing would change long term. History would glue itself back together'. Alongside their excursions, each tries to find their own way of being helpful at a time of crisis, whether that involves becoming a firefighter or taking care of children.
An author's note at the beginning leaves us in no doubt of the anti-war message of the book, with one character reflecting, 'It's us've wrecked the system, with our wars. I don't understand why people go to all that trouble to kill other people they've never met. What's to be got?' A familiar refrain, perhaps, but the second World War is often exempted from such messages in British fiction.
The compassion McCaughrean allows her characters to extend to those fighting on the other side is also striking, and seems curiously old-fashioned in our current era of black-and-white thinking. We could do with more of it in both stories and reality.
A kind of magic: Romantasy author Emily J Taylor
'Minutes after she escaped Inverly, the Written Door between the two worlds was burned to cinders, obliterating its magic. Then the fire spread to the other Written Door connecting Barrow and Leyland, burning it as well, stranding thousands on either side. By the time the smoke had cleared, everyone had learned the truth: that Inverly was destroyed and everyone inside of it was gone forever.'
Emily J Taylor's second novel,
The Otherwhere Post
(Pushkin, £16.99), tugs us into a compelling universe of scriptomancy, a kind of magic involving handwriting and carefully mixed inks that allows travel between worlds.
Seven years on from a terrible disaster, Maeve Abenthy cons her way into a training programme that may let her uncover the origin of a mysterious letter, and discover the true villain of that awful day. Hiding her own identity as the daughter of the man blamed for the tragedy, she nevertheless finds an ally in her mentor, Tristan, who has his own fraught relationship with this magic.
Romantasy is at its most satisfying when the crackling tension between two characters is informed by the magical systems within the particular world, and Taylor does an excellent job on this front, with a tale both absorbing and swoon-worthy.