(no subject)

So I picked up The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, and immediately a pile of tropes out of the YA Dystopia of the Week fell straight on my head: Ashala is a member of the resistance! with superpowers! but she's been captured! and turned over to the dystopic government! by a mysteriously hot boy who infiltrated her resistance group and BETRAYED HER and she HATES him even though he's SUPER HOT with MYSTERIOUS MOTIVES!

BECCA: oh noooooo I can see the GRIMDARK and the BORING LOVE TRIANGLE looming around the corner AS WE SPEAK @___@

So I read on, glumly braced for the Standard YA Dystopia Plot to run its Standard YA Dystopia Course...

....but instead, I got:

- a heroine of Aboriginal descent -- written by an Aboriginal author -- with superpowers grounded in her heritage
- a plot that's about two levels more complex than it initially appears and revolves around the foresight, choices and agency of Ashala and her two best female rebel friends, The Brilliant And Ruthless One and The Creepy Little Girl Who Loves Spiders, so, I mean, well played appealing to character archetypes for me there
- in general, a sense of agency for pretty much everyone -- including, for a wonder, some sympathetic and useful government officials! what! I didn't know that was allowed in dystopic YA!
- overall, a worldview that explicitly rejects the entire grimdark trend and throws it out the window -- Ambelin Kwaymullina says in her author's note that the end of the world is also the beginning, and once you get through all the initial trappings of the current trends in YA literature, that sense of optimism, of the resurgence of the numinous, permeates the book the whole way through
- ....a boring romance. Well, you can't have everything.

(And, I mean, it's not a love triangle, and it's not rage-inducing, SO SURE, I'll take boring!)

I also really enjoyed the evil mind-control machine with the heart and soul of an adorable puppy dog.

Seriously, though, if you're going to pick up any dystopic YA of the recent crop, I'd absolutely recommend this one; unlike most of the rest, this actually hits the optimistic, team-building action-adventure that I'd like the post-apocalyptic trend to be, rather than what ... it generally actually is ....

(I mean, don't get me wrong, many of the others have given me great entertainment -- 'AND THEN THE PLAGUE-RIDDEN LAND GOT HIT BY ANOTHER, EVEN WORSE PLAGUE!' -- but reader cannot live on over-the-top hilarity alone.)

I will absolutely be reading the rest of the books in the series as soon as they become available.