ENG 100-Young Adult Lit.

Trying to find something to connect to this book was somewhat difficult. The book Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor centers around the aforementioned "dreamer" in Lazlo Strange. He is a war orphan who ends up becoming a junior librarian at the Great Libary of Zosma. An early theme, or topic, in the book, is that a dream chooses the dreamer and not the other way around. Lazlo is worried that his dreams chose poorly and since the age of five has been determined to figure out why the name of the Unseen city was "stolen" from his mind. He is constantly seeking information about the Unseen city when he is a librarian and reads constantly. Dreaming of one day making it to the city of the Unseen. Eventually, this dream becomes a reality when he accompanies Tizerkane warriors on a journey to the city. We learn later as that five half-human children of murdered gods are trapped in the citadel that floats over the Unseen city. This brings us to the character Sarai, the...

For a while now our culture has been soaking up zombie-related media as much as it can. And while I haven’t been one of those many people, there’s no denying how popular zombies related things have become. For example, one of TV’s most popular TV shows ever is The Walking Dead which started in 2010 and really helped grow the post-apocalyptic genre that is so popular in today’s culture. Many shows or movies that have been centered around this are popular because they allow us to examine mankind and hypothetically see what decisions are made. An apocalypse reveals people’s true colors and allows for the fictional society to start over. Allow for our society today to accept and be captured by these experiences. Our society has chewed up this type of storytelling as of late, and so people will—for better or worse—prefer something zombie related than something based around US history. However, author Justina Ireland combines the two in an interesting way in her novel Dread Nation. She blend...