Breaking and making is at the heart of a great many stories and it reflects the journey that adolescents have to navigate as they grow into adulthood.
"My 13-year old daughter seems to be reading nothing but stories set in horrible future worlds. In them, the land and the buildings are destroyed, laws are broken, rulers are corrupt and adults have either disappeared or been reduced to unreliable protectors. Wouldn't it be better to show children how to look after the world they live in rather than tell them that what exists is not worth saving?
Following the success of Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games but also many other dark novels set in uncomfortable futures, including Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy and Charlie Higson's The Enemy and its sequels, it is easy to think that the question "What if the world as we know it ended?" is the only question posed in books for 12+.
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