 I've only recently finished reading The Young World. It seemed appropriate for the time. A few months ago I read the first book in the series all about a pandemic that wipes out the entire adult population, leaving only teenagers, to fend for themselves. It follows a group of survivors in the remains of post-apocalyptic Manhattan, a group of survivors who set out to find a cure, and at the very end of the book they find out that there are some adults still alive, though they don't know from where they come. The second and third books are awful. They're awful in just about every way, despite the first book being good, despite the first book having promise, despite the first book even having cliches. It had effort. It was a very dark story, which you don't see very often in the young adult genre, a very dark, violent story that included themes of sex slavery and rape. You don't see that a lot, but it was at least refreshing to see something different. The second book begins with Jefferson and his friends. Being prisoner on an aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan. The military men on board are adults, so they know some people survive somehow. Was it quarantine? I'm not sure, at least not at first, but as the story goes on we learn that not only have a couple of small pockets of adults survived. No, that would make too much sense. It turns out the entire world has survived, except for the Americas. Yes, that's right, they somehow managed to quarantine to entire continents. Now obviously a pandemic that only kills off a certain subset of the population isn't going to make that much sense from a scientific standpoint, but at least it was consistently stupid before. Now they've somehow managed to quarantine the most deadly virus that has ever existed on two entire continents, and somehow nobody escaped to spread it, and somehow word has never gotten out to the people in the Americas that are still alive, nor has word gotten out to anyone outside of the Americas that's still alive. That doesn't make any sense, bro, but despite the collapse of the United States as we know it, and the death of most of its government, the military is still out there, specifically the Navy. It's able to use its power to bully other people into doing its bidding, and so the United States has entered a sort of alliance with the United Kingdom and created a new empire that rules over most of the world. In other words, this post-apocalyptic adventure story has now become a young adult dystopia. Jefferson manages to escape and run back to New York. Things aren't great there. They weren't great before, but now they're even worse. Despite having the cure, his old tribe has been taken over by another tribe. The men are being used as a forced labor force, while the women have been carried off somewhere for some unsavory purpose. Jefferson manages to convince some others that he has a cure, and he manages to free his tribesmen. Well, the men, anyways. But he knows that the powers that be are just going to wait for them to die, so he proposes a gathering of all the tribes in Manhattan. He wants them to come together, to stop fighting. He'll give them the cure if they can form some sort of democratic city-state. It's a good idea, I suppose, and it is interesting to watch him struggle with the idea of not getting revenge on people who have wronged him and his friends. Nonetheless, something about it feels hollow. Because in the last book, they were saving humanity. In this one, they're simply saving a small set of themselves. The stakes have been drastically lowered. Meanwhile, Donna is still off in the United Kingdom. She's been let loose, but under supervision. She's now going to college, and she thinks her friends are dead. So she's sad about that and stuff. Who the fuck thought this would be interesting? At the end of the book, she goes back to New York. Meanwhile, Jefferson has failed in his attempt to bring all the factions together, and they're at war once more. The third book follows them, trying to get their hands on a nuclear football that the United States President had right before he died of the plague. Oh, okay, now we're back to saving all of humanity. The football falls into the hands of Evan, the leader of the Uptown Confederacy. Evan is fucking insane. The chapters from his point of view are interesting, if nothing else. Normally, I hate books with more than one POV. They rarely stand apart from one another. This series is an exception, however. Even though it's all in first person, all the characters have totally distinct personalities, and they're all enjoyable in their own way. Weird. The problem with this setup is that it feels like a shitty James Bond knockoff, where the villain sends in the codes to launch the missiles, and the heroes have only a couple of minutes to stop him, and they manage to do so during a battle at the top of the Empire State Building. And then when they win, what happens? Well, they start giving out the cure to all the other kids in the United States, and beyond. Because you see, there's a resistance group. Of course, there's a resistance group. It's a dystopian young adult novel. Why the fuck wouldn't there be a resistance group? But this resistance group was trying to get its hands on the nuclear weapons, and when they couldn't do that, they spread a mutated version of the pandemic all over the world. So now people are gonna die if they don't get the cure, but the only way to get the cure is from the kids that survived it. Makes perfect sense, bro. So the quote-unquote good guys are insane. Who thought this was a good idea? The story ends with them just sort of saying that they're going to make the future better. It's very sudden, really. Almost as sudden as the drop in quality from the first book to the second. Despite events going on in the world now, I thought it would be fascinating to read about pandemics more. I've read multiple books about pandemics just in the past couple of weeks. But after seeing how far down the tubes this one went, I've come to one conclusion. Maybe we shouldn't let the guy who directed a golden compass write post-apocalyptic adventure stories. 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