Dread Nation and Rebel Seoul: for all your action/adventure needs!

Cybils nominations are almost open! From Oct 1-15 you can nominate your favourite kid/YA books in a bunch of different categories. This year I'm a round 1 judge for YA Spec Fiction, so I'm trying to get a head start on reading the books I'm pretty sure will be nominated. And these two are definitely going to be nominated!

If you like adventure with a sci-fi flavour, set in a futuristic city with giant fighting robots, then have I got a book for you! Or if you prefer alternate-history fantasy with corsets and zombies, then I also have a book for you! (Not the same one. That would be, well, I guess that would be a time travel book, and I don't have one of those for you today!)

I've been looking forward to reading these two books for a while, because they have such awesome premises: Rebel Seoul, by Axie Oh, has a sort of 1984 dystopian vibe, with the world divided into constantly warring states, except it's more fun because GIANT FIGHTING ROBOTS! Ahem. (I would like to state for the record that I find the concept of giant fighting robots entirely ridiculous.)(End of disclaimer.) Our main character Jaewon grew up in a gang in Old Seoul, but he can escape all that if he excels at the military academy, (which appears to consist mostly of playing video games, so, yeah!) He's got a complicated past that I would like to have seen more of (prequel maybe?? hint, hint) but basically he's driven to succeed and he's pinned all his hopes on becoming a Neo Seoul soldier. But guess what: all is not shiny and bright in Neo Seoul. There's some unethical stuff going on about supersoldiers (something always goes wrong with supersoldiers: will dystopian governments never figure that out?)(except for Captain America, apparently. that one was fine for some reason??) and Jaewon ultimately has to decide where his loyalty lies. This one definitely reminded me of Marie Lu's Legend series: if you liked that one you need to check Rebel Seoul out.

Dread Nation, by Justina Ireland, hashes the American Civil War and slavery together with zombies and adds a cynical, short-tempered, zombie-slaying black narrator. There was no way this could not be good, and it was. As a young Negro in a post-slavery but terribly prejudiced zombie-overrun America, Jane is required to attend combat school and prepare to defend well-bred white ladies from the undead. Jane has opinions about this, but she is very good at her training. She's not very good at doing what she's told, however, and she gets sent to a scary utopian settlement (utopian for the white folks, that is) and meets even nastier people than the zombies. Many zombies are decapitated or otherwise killed in grisly ways; Jane kicks butt in zombie-slaying as well as in friend-rescuing and standing-up-for-justice; slavery and prejudice and institutionalized injustice are examined with the interesting perspective that zombies add. (For the record, zombies are an inherently ridiculous concept and I don't usually like the kinds of plots that they inevitably produce, but they do make great metaphors for whatever societal ills you happen to want to excoriate.) Jane is an entirely enjoyable narrator to ride along with: I particularly loved her letters home describing Miss Preston's School of Combat.

Both these books are wonderful at creating fascinating, unique, immersive settings. They also both have lots to say about economic and social disparities: the settings aren't just fun sandboxes to play in (though they are certainly that); they also point very pointed fingers at the inequities of our own world. In an entertaining, you-are-an-arrogant-bigot-so-I-will-blow-you-up kind of way.

Cliffhanger warning: not terrible cliffhangers, but these are both first books and the story continues! (Yay!)

Start thinking about the books you want to nominate: I can't wait to see what everyone thinks were the best books in 2018! (And being a round 1 judge means I have to read most of them, so that will be fun!)