YA Dystopia: The Glass Arrow, Kristen Simmons

The Glass Arrow
Kristen Simmons
ISBN: 9780765336613
YA Dystopia
Read April 24, 2015

This wasn't a bad book, but I wanted a lot more from it than it gave.  The premise is sketchy, but interesting: women somehow caused an uprising, and now pregnancy uncommon, and male birthrate is very low.  Thus, women are considered property, and young girls are sheltered in "Gardens" before being auctioned off to the highest bidder; unless of course they're willing to hide out in the wilderness and live off the land.  Even those wild folk have to worry about their girls being hunted down - they're generally considered to be more fertile.

That's our info-dump, and that's really all we get through the whole book.  There's a whole society of people who manage to live out in the wilds fairly happily, but they're not the focus so we don't learn much about them.  The actual history of why women were targeted in the first place is presented as mythology, leading me to hope that it wasn't intended to be the real rationale behind the development of this misogynistic society.

That's my biggest gripe with dystopian YA in general - there's just not enough worldbuilding for me to be really engaged in the story.  I want to know the backgrounds, and the history, and the culture, and the development of this crazy world, even if the main characters aren't able to understand or see how it works, I (as a reader) want to know that information is there and being considered.

I don't mean to say that this book is bad, just I really wanted some more depth to the world.  It was a light, enjoyable read, that was straightforward about personhood and autonomy and self-determination, and I really appreciated that.