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Nancy Keane's | Booktalks -- Quick and Simple | |
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Yates, Alexander. HOW WE BECAME WICKED New York : Atheneum, [2019] IL 5-8 ISBN 9781481419840 2 booktalks |
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Booktalk #1 In this gripping dystopian novel a viral disease carried by a glowing purple mosquito hybrid called Singers spread the disease Wickedness throughout the world. When you are Wicked you are the infected and carry the plague and roam about freely. The Wicked have the mannerisms of a child but will rip you limb to limb. If you are True, you are in isolated or contained communities protected by the outside world with domes, bee suits, and gallons of insecticides. If you are Vexed you are the lucky ones. You can tell by their purple eyes. There seem to be only two: Astrid and Natalie, who live in separate communities, but are somehow linked. They have survived a Singer sting so they are immune. Everyone is interested in them because they may be the answer to the cure. What does Wicked truly mean? Astrid, Natalie and Hank realize the world isn’t as it seems. Are the True wicked as well? (Donna Barthlomew, Pine Lake Middle School Evergreen Teen Book Award, 2022) Booktalk #2 Ordinarily, a disease caused by an insect-borne virus would divide society into the sick and the healthy; but because of the unique way the infected act--like dangerously sociopathic children with no conscience or remorse--they are called “Wicked.” Enclaves of the rich, isolated, or lucky provide an oasis for the “True,” those neither bitten by the humming insects called “singers” nor attacked or infected by the murderous zombielike hordes, who infect others and kill with casual joy. Somewhere on the coast of Maine, Goldsport provides just such a safe space for the rich who founded it. Teens Astrid and Hank grow up behind those expensive walls, venturing out of the domed area only with beekeeping gear and precautions for Hank, with much older folks and one another for company. Astrid alone is “vexed,” immune through a controversial, mostly deadly, treatment to allow infants to be stung by the “singers.” Natalie’s parallel story alternates that of the Goldsport duo. Her life takes place on an island with weather currents that keep the stingers away, where just she and her small family, including a “wicked” grandfather who has to be kept locked in the lighthouse, make do. A conversation with a wandering wicked at the community gates and violence that follows reawakens questions Astrid has about the compound and about what lies beyond. Circumstances will show her all too much about the past and present of their tenuous life. Astrid and Natalie’s lives have more in common than either could guess, and neither “wicked” nor “true” means quite what they might have thought as this creepy, speculative, post-apocalyptic tale hurtles forward. (Georgia Peach Book Award, 2022) |
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Virus diseases -- Fiction. |
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