Remedial Dystopia

I'm not a big fan of YA lit. Nothing like it when I was young. I grew up with Kesey, Huxley, Salinger, Dickens and The Who. I probably would have liked a steady diet of teen vampires and young dystopians. I would have loved my comic book heroes on the big screen in 3D. And video games and smart phones and search engines. Oh to be a millenial!

I was introduced to a truckload of Young Adult Lit during English Ed studies and found myself wanting to read _Catcher in the Rye_ all over again. There was just something really amateurish and disposable about these novellas. Like the authors weren't fully-developed writers. Nor am I all that interested in movies adapted from these novels, unless they are packed with talent (_The Hunger Games_), or star someone I just can't get enough of. That someone at the moment is Shailene Woodley. A young woman who is just oozing talent. She has that authentic, subdued strain of self-consciousness, it makes you forget she's in a movie. In fact, her focus seems to come so unassumingly natural I wonder if she even knows she's in a movie.

I watched _The Fault in Our Stars_, The Spectacular Now and _Divergent_ in succession. _Divergent_ is getting short-changed by the same critics who praise _The Hunger Games_. Yes, it's simplistic, essentially a shallow allegory. Factions representing classes, institutions and vocations. The coercion of the Dauntless by the Erudite as a military coup. And rebellious adolescents as heroic Divergents. But if this gets kids even remotely interested in politics and the social sciences, I'm all for it. I'd prefer this to bare-chested werewolves and forest warfare. Then again, there's no defending _Divergent_ if it weren't for Woodley's splendid presence. Her inner strength mixing in with her vulnerability. She provides the suspense, as we are always awaiting her next reaction. Makes me wonder how she'll develop in the years to come? As well as Kate Winslow has I'm sure.