Brave New Love

Gr 9 Up—The editor of this collection asked 13 authors to imagine what love might look like in a dystopian future. In Carrie Vaughn's "Now Purple with Love's Wound," young women are drugged so that they are bound to the men assigned as their husbands, but Elspa wants to find a way to convince her husband-to-be that her love is real. In Amanda Downum's "Red," a poisonous rain falls on the world, turning people into flesh-eating zombies, and Audra is drawn to something or someone out in the deadly water. And in Carrie Ryan's "The Dream Eater," an unnamed narrator finds himself visiting a tortured girl whose abject misery ensures the happiness and prosperity of an entire society. Though many of these stories are great, they are also frustrating. In almost all of them, the authors have imagined incredible, painful, horrifying, desperate, and complex universes that are abandoned after a scant number of pages, making readers feel as though they've immersed themselves in new worlds only to be tossed back out of them just as quickly. Many of the plots seem like beginnings of much longer tales rather than self-contained short stories.—Heather M. Campbell, formerly at Philip S. Miller Library, Castle Rock, CO