So, I'm going to take a brief intermission from poetry to discuss a recent tweet from @rondacbaker.  She had asked, "What makes a great YA dystopian novel"?  Now, you know how I like to wax philosophical about all things YA, so I mulled this around in my head for days and here's what I've come up with:

Besides the obvious requirement that the main characters should be teenagers and therefore the plot should directly involve them and their lives, I think a great dystopian novel mimics the entire world of a teenager.  I mean, lets face it, adolescence is a dystopia!  Every teen thinks that they are living a life that is repressed and controlled.  Therefore, the dystopia would have to reinforce their ideas on what would be (or is) the most horrible things conceivable, i.e. lack of choice/no free will, no foreseeable future, parents agreeing with the forces that be and encouraging the teens to follow the rules of the land (instead of protecting their kids against it), sexual/romantic tensions that they don't know how to handle, etc.  All of these things would create a world that any teenager could relate to, and yet, no teenager would care to live in.

And that is what a great YA dystopian novels does; it takes what already scares or upsets teens and it blows it out of proportion, but not too much.  Great dystopias are ones we can believe are possible, And yet, you can still close the page and return to a world that isn't so terrible after all.