Sunday, November 11, 2018

I want to buy this YA trilogy about gene-hacking for every teen I know

Young adult science fiction can be hit or miss. Each genre tag is a challenge by itself; with science fiction, unless you’re already a scientist, you have to be able to speak the technical language to be taken seriously. With YA, the task is the same, just inverted — if your characters are young, you must inhabit the headspace of a teenager without coming off as an Tryhard Old™. YA sci-fi, then, is akin to walking a razor’s edge authority-wise: be brilliant and naïve simultaneously, or risk losing your audience from the jump.

Portland-based author Emily Suvada walks this line better than any YA author I’ve read with her in-progress trilogy, the second book of which, This Cruel Design, was published last month. Along with its predecessor,...

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