Books like Unwind

What intrigues me about this book is the way the author, Margaret Atwood, took the (Genesis 30) story of Jacob, who impregnated his wife's handmaiden to produce the children which his wife could not conceive.

She then puts herself in the place of that handmaiden and asks some serious questions. Was that handmaid even given a choice in the matter? What would have happened to her if she had refused? She then rolls the same idea forward 4,000 years to a pseudo religious society in which the sole purpose of handmaidens is to use their bodies to conceive and gestate the next generation for those whom they serve.

I first read Orwell’s dystopian nightmare as a teenager and have gone back to it several times since.

Apparently, it is such a brilliant description of life under totalitarianism that, during the communist era, some Eastern Europeans refused to believe that an inhabitant of a democratic country could have written such a book. 

Even today, I find the book very relevant, as Orwell develops themes of truth, propaganda, doublethink, and the misuse of language that you can find in Homage to Catalonia, written a decade earlier. And the ubiquitous and intrusive telescreen has a parallel in our age of surveillance capitalism and the way the Chinese authorities are using information technology to cement their rule.

Not everything that seems harmful does us harm, and not everything that seems good does us good.

I love books that make me reconsider the world I live in, and although Brave New World was published in 1932, its use of empty entertainment, sex, drugs, and medicated happiness as instruments of social control feels startlingly contemporary.

In dystopias built around punishment, power forces people to obey; here, pleasure makes them willing. The Romans already understood this through panem et circenses, and I see the same mechanism around us today. We fail to notice the cage because we are too busy seeking it out and locking ourselves inside.

This book broadened my perspective and taught me to look at apparent comforts with more suspicious eyes.

I love this series of three short novels enough to have read it more times than I can count. The language of the novel is simple and evocative. I love the main character, a young wizard who starts out as proud, angry and arrogant, but becomes deeply compassionate when his hubris leads him to make a tragic and evil use of magic.

I could feel myself grabbed by the world of the novel, a world of men and dragons, of islands dotted in an endless sea, of powerful mages who interfere at their peril with the precarious balance of the world between good and evil. 

Although technically a “graphic novel”, Moore’s novel has nonetheless been a relevant warning on both complacency and ignorance. Powerful entities not only use the “shove it under the rug” to their advantage, but they both incentivize and negatively reinforce behavior to promote this kind of mindset.

This is a story about re-empowering the individual, not only for their self-worth and pride, but to have the courage to stand against tyranny in order to choose true freedom over the chains of oppression. People should never be afraid of their governments, but rather the governments should remain fearful of their people.

The Animorphs series combines two things I was fascinated with as a child—aliens and animals! In The Invasion mind-controlling aliens called Yeerks invade Earth. A group of teens accidentally sees proof of this invasion and are given the power to turn into animals in order to fight the Yeerks! Most adventure series take you to different worlds, but I really enjoyed how The Invasion was set in the real world. While Jake, Cassie, Marco, Rachel, and Tobias struggle with a powerful alien force bend on world domination, they’re also dealing with the typical challenges and stresses of teenage life like exams, parents, and prom! The Invasion also offers fascinating viewpoints of what it might be like to live as the animals that surround us. 

As a kid, I loved all kinds of fiction—sci-fi, fantasy, realistic, historical—pretty much anything I could get my hands on! D.J. MacHale’s Pendragon series magically captures the best of every genre. In The Merchant of Death, Bobby Pendragon, a seemingly normal fourteen-year-old boy, finds himself pulled into an alternate dimension ruled by a magical tyrant. Bobby learns he is a Traveler, someone gifted with the ability to travel between alternate dimensions (called Territories) and his destiny is much bigger than he could ever have imagined. The Merchant of Death is a thrilling start to a captivating YA adventure!

As a big sci-fi fan, I often loved exploring the idea of what would happen if the human race ever met aliens. In Galax-Arena, three children are kidnapped and forced to perform death-defying circus stunts in order to entertain their captors. Not only does the story contain some riveting descriptions of acrobatic feats and tricks, the story explores fascinating concepts of slavery, trust, and what it means to be a child in comparison to an adult. 

Call me weird. I’m not a fan of series books. Unless, that is, they’re written by Nicholas Sansbury Smith. The problem with a book series for me is that I get bored of the same idea book after book after…zzzzzz. But when someone writing a book series is constantly bringing new ideas to the table, it keeps me reading. Couple that with characters we care about, and a heavy focus on moving the plot forward, and I’ll finish a book in no time and be eager to read the next one. This, my friends, is the first book in one of those series. 

In Wilder Girls, a bizarre, unprecedented plague called the Tox has infested an island home to an all-girls boarding school. The Tox causes those it infects to mutate in gruesome ways—growing gills, claws, an extra spine, et cetera. The schoolgirls and remaining sparse crew of staff members have developed a system of survival, but when one girl goes missing and her friend determines to find her, everything is thrown into chaos.

This book will grip you hard from the first sentence, sink its teeth into you, shake you around, then have you gasping for air on the floor by the time you hit the last page. Seriously, this is an insane, intense ride, perfect for any fan of weird fiction and body horror. (That’s me.)