Your YA expertise is required

For my PhD, I'm looking at YA novels that are political. And by political, I don't mean where a parent or school or other authority figure is a metaphor for the state, or where political issues are played out in microcosms of school or church. I mean books where teenagers actually engage with real-world politics and politicians. Can you help me out with some titles? I'm particularly interested in recent books, and real-world books (not fantasy, but I am including a couple of dystopic examples). Here's my list so far:


Little Brother, Cory Doctorow


Uglies, Scott Westerfeld


Vote for Larry, Janet Tashjian


Feed, MT Anderson


The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins


Wide Awake, David Levithan


Ready or Not, Meg Cabot


Genesis, Bernard Beckett


I'm aware that the giant gaping hole in my list is an Australian title. But I genuinely can't think of one. There are a few candidates from the 1980s (Obernewtyn, Scatterlings, Taronga, the Pagan series and even maybe People Might Hear You), but I just can't find anything recent. The closest is John Marsden's Tomorrow series, except the series is explicitly apolitical (one of the reasons why I'm not a massive fan).


So help me out, Internet! Give me some good political YA titles.

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Published on March 17, 2011 15:09
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