One of the most popular dystopian genres is teen novel. The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Giver to name a few of the more popular books. I believe this is an interesting genre for dystopias because authors use it to challenge social norms and standards, something that is particularly impactful on the young readers of these books. It isn’t just teenagers who read these books though, as the parents are often convinced to read them in order to converse with their children, plus, these books are often made into movies, where they are read and edited by the producers, screen editors, camera men, video editors, and then re-consumed the the general population. 

All of the teen dystopian novels I have read have been about a teenager overthrowing some sort of corrupt government or system. The vast majority of these novels end in the success of the teenager, which is a much more optomistic take on dystopia than a lot of the other genres take. In the right mood, this can be a good thing, but in general, I think that the constraint of optimism limits the genre, and can somewhat cause the books to borderline on utopian rather than dystopian. Some of the limits optimism puts on these novels are that they usually have a happy ending, which means that the author loses their last chance to drive their point home.

Examples of some of the more popular teen dystopian novels are below.

The Hunger Games Trilogy By Suzanne Collins

This book is probably the most famous teen dystopian novel, and really the trendsetter. After this novel came out, countless others followed, especially after it’s movie series was popularized.

The Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One is one of the more recently published of these novels, it takes place in a world were people are within a virtual world more often than the real world. I loved this book, and like so many other dystopian novels, we can see exactly what the author is criticizing (in this book it is the intensive amount of time that teenagers spend playing video games).