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Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | TEEN FICTION WEI | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"Chris Weitz has made a beautiful transition from writing and directing films to novels. The Young World is populated with characters you won't forget and a story as fresh and urgent as Divergent ."--James Patterson, #1 NY Times bestselling author of Maximum Ride .
Welcome to New York, a city ruled by teens.
After a mysterious Sickness wipes out the rest of the population, the young survivors assemble into tightly run tribes. Jefferson, the reluctant leader of the Washington Square tribe, and Donna, the girl he's secretly in love with, have carved out a precarious existence among the chaos.
But when a fellow tribe member discovers a clue that may hold the cure for the Sickness, five teens set out on a life-altering road trip, exchanging gunfire with enemy gangs, escaping cults and militias, braving the wilds of the subway--all in order to save humankind.
This first novel from acclaimed film writer/director Chris Weitz is the heart-stopping debut of an action-packed trilogy.
Author Notes
Chris Weitz is an Oscar-nominated writer and director. His films include Twilight: New Moon , A Better Life , About a Boy , The Golden Compass , American Pie , Cinderella , and the upcoming Rogue One: A Star Wars Story . The Young World is his first YA trilogy.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Weitz kicks off a trilogy with a riveting adventure in which teenagers-the only ones immune to a fatal plague known as the Sickness-have inherited the Earth and are fighting over the remnants of New York City. Jefferson and Donna lead the group in their search to find a cure, with each chapter flipping back and forth between their points of view. Narrators Julian and Locke turn in a mixed performance of this postapocalyptic YA tale. Julian provides the voice for Jefferson and aptly captures his internal thoughts, but his portrayal, which sounds distanced and soft spoken, does not quite meld with the character of Loche's Donna, who sounds a little too bubbly for how the character is written. Both narrations could use better sound balancing, as there are times when adjusting the audio is necessary to hear both characters. Ages 15-up. A Little, Brown hardcover. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
It's two years since the sickness hit, killing all adults and children. Only teenagers remain to rule the world. In a Lord of the Flies fashion, the social order has broken down, and the survivors have gathered together into tribes. Everyone expires now at age 18, and when Jefferson's older brother dies, the leadership of Manhattan's Washington Square Tribe passes to the reluctant teen. Soon thereafter, a possible cure for the sickness is discovered or is it a chimera? To find out, Jeff and four members of his tribe, including Donna, the girl he loves, undertake a perilous journey in search of the truth. Telling his story in the alternating voices of Jeff and Donna, noted film director Weitz, in his first YA novel, has done a good job of meticulously building his postapocalyptic world, though sometimes at the expense of action. Still, there is more than enough to keep readers turning the pages and anticipating volume two of what promises to be what else? a trilogy and ultimately, perhaps, a movie? HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Weitz's high profile in Hollywood and a five-star marketing push have already created plenty of anticipation for his youth-book debut.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
CHRIS WEITZ'S "The Young World" tells of a Manhattan dominated by tribes of swaggering, self-possessed adolescents, some buzzed on attention-deficit medication, cruising through the city while adults cringe in the shadows, fearing for their lives. Oh, no, that was my teenage daughter's diary of her life in eighth grade last year. (Sorry for the joke, darling; I would never read your journal, really.) But in Weitz's novel, those things do happen - save that the adults are all dead. Indeed, Weitz takes that familiar, real-world theme of precocious autonomy and carries it to its logical end: What if Manhattan was not just dominated by adolescents but actually ruled by them in a Hobbesian world of violence and savagery? The premise of "The Young World" is that the Sickness, a mysterious disease that kills adults and children but spares adolescents, has struck worldwide. New York's surviving teenagers, aware that they too will die when they reach adulthood, are divided into heavily armed tribes, growing vegetables in Washington Square and scrounging for medicine in abandoned Duane Reades. There are moments, early on in the book, when you may feel a Sickness yourself, this one caused by the contagion of pure predictability. With the setup established in the first 20 pages, and the narration cleverly divided between tough-girl Donna and nerd-genius Jefferson, you begin to think you could write the rest of the book - for that matter, cast the movie and create the video game - by yourself. Weitz is a successful screenwriter ("The Golden Compass," "About a Boy"), and if you didn't know that when you began reading, it wouldn't take you long to guess. If there is a moment of conventional construction to resist, he leaves it unresisted: On Page 54 we are given a list of our dramatis personae: "Brainbox (evil genius); Donna (slightly unhinged girl-power chick); Peter (gay Christian adrenaline junkie)." Not long after, we meet the tiny Asian girl known as SeeThrough, who turns out to be, of course, a master of the martial arts. But even a skeptic would grudgingly concede that Weitz is a successful screenwriter because he is a fine - at times terrific - storyteller. Dystopian fantasies depend on details, and here they are often unforgettably right. Seizing on the idea that survivors would try to recreate some form of social media, Weitz imagines one painting a Facebook page on the wall, while for others lost technology persists as physical tics: "Nowadays phones are like - what did they call them? - phantom limbs," Donna says. "You'll be talking to somebody and they'll look down and start rubbing their fingers together. They want to be texting someone." The details are so apt that they almost make up for Weitz's unabashed exploitation of action-movie mainstays: Characters we believed were dead emerge from nowhere to blow away bad guys; weapons operate with an ease - never jamming or running short of ammo - that seems more probable in a Times Square multiplex than an actual urban apocalypse. As Donna and Jefferson's tribe searches for the source of the Sickness, a question rises: What is the deep appeal of this kind of fantasy right now? That it is a well-developed - even an overdeveloped - genre is disarmingly acknowledged by Donna: "Even when it was happening, all I could think was, this is just like 'Contagion.' And later, this is just like 'Lord of the Flies' meets 'Hunger Games.'" Though in the past, young adult fiction often drew on the challenges of isolation, there was usually a benevolent adult hovering in the background, coming to the rescue in the end. The new note of these books is of a self-sufficiency nearly absolute and imposed. J.M. Barrie's Lost Boys now would face a more lethal Captain Hook, with no Wendy to save them or Tinker Bell to humanize them. Yet it is Donna's cultural allusiveness, her awareness of the fictions that make up her world, that helps her survive. This fantasy of youthful precocity put to practical use, already the dream of every 14-year-old in New York, seems somehow central to our time. The fascination of turning allusiveness into action may even explain the desire of an author as potentially imaginative and original as Chris Weitz to write such crisply practical, such shrewdly shameless, popular entertainments. ADAM GOPNIK is the author of "The Steps Across the Water" and "The King in the Window."
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-The premise is familiar-an apocalyptic event spares only teens who are now fighting, romancing, and wise-cracking their way to a better tomorrow. After the Sickness, survivors like Jefferson and Donna joined tribes, and now they use barter, looting, urban farming, and gunfights to get by. In his first novel, screenwriter Weitz (The Twilight Saga: New Moon) mixes clever teen slang and pop culture references with likable stock characters, such as the socially inept, brainiac, campy gay dude, and the feisty Chinese girl who's skilled at martial arts. Weitz peppers his story with such concepts as fiat currency and zoo animals in the Metropolitan Museum, as well as four-letter words and occasionally crude smack talk. When it appears that a scientific paper at the main branch of the New York Public Library might hold the secret to the Sickness, Jeff and his tribe decide to go get it. Narrator José Julián is superb as Jefferson, and Spencer Locke delivers a good (if slightly valley girl-inflected) performance as Donna. Both narrators read Weitz's screenplay-styled passages with a staccato "he said/she said" delivery, distinguishing speakers without need for a wide variety of accents or pitches. The Young World works well as an audiobook and is recommended for high school libraries.-Maggie Knapp, Trinity Valley School, Fort Worth, TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A twisted Neverland where you don't get older, you just die. As if traffic and congestion weren't enough to cope with in Manhattan, the rapid-fire, incurable Sickness has begun eliminating New Yorkers. Strangely, the only unaffected residents are teenagers. Stranger still, once the surviving teens reach their 18th birthdays, fever, coughs, delirium and death swiftly follow. A short life means there's no reason for civilized order, so New York devolves into Mad Max-like chaos. Union Square and Washington Square are no longer overpriced zip codes, they're pocket territories for tribes of gun-toting teens as likely to trade a pig for people as they are to resort to cannibalism. When the brainiac of one of these tribes theorizes that he can cure the Sickness, a cluster of five dives headfirst into the task of either saving civilization or prematurely ending their already doomed lives. Inclusion of New York landmarks lends an authenticity that makes the chaos frighteningly plausible. Through the dual narration of Jefferson, the focal tribe leader, and Donna, his crush, veteran screenwriter and director Weitz presents a veritable dichotomy of literary and commercial; Jefferson's chapters are intellectually elevated, while Donna often sounds like an elongated Facebook post. The action perseveres, the sex, blood and violence dominate, and race and class clashes continue headlong into the sequel. A post-apocalyptic teen novel that's far from just another post-apocalyptic teen novel. (Post-apocalyptic adventure. 13 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
