What to Read Next if You Liked The Invisible Bridge, Allegiant, The Giver, The Alchemist, or Maximum Ride
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, by Rick Perlstein, is the highly controversial, much discussed account of the end of one iconic political carrer and the liftoff of another. Bookend the experience by going back to happier times for Richard Nixon with The Greatest Comeback, by Patrick J. Buchanan, which chronicles his recovery from a devastating losses in the 1960 presidential election, and a bid for governorship of California in 1962, through a monumental victory in his second attempt at the Oval Office in 1968.
Allegiant, by Veronica Roth, is the deeply polarizing final installment in the massively popular Divergent trilogy. Upon its release, as many fans embraced the risky final twists as rejected them outright. It was not dissimilar to the reaction that met Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins’ crescendo to The Hunger Games. Reading them both provides enough meat for an academic study in subverting genre tropes and audience expectations. Catch up now, and then see how Hollywood tries to sand down the rough edges when they are collectively adapted into a total of four films over the next few years.
The Giver, by Lois Lowry, is the grandmother of the current wave of YA fiction featuring oppressive, totalitarian governments and the teens who hate them. For another vintage look at kids fighting against the system, look the the Tripods series by John Christopher (starting with The White Mountains). The books date from the late 1960s, but the storyline, about a group of kids who team up to throw off the yoke of oppression-by-alien-mind-control that has ensnared all earthly society, is as suspenseful as ever. Massive, betentacled machines that can suck the will to resist right out of your brain never go out of style, I guess.
The Alchemist, by Paul Coelho, is less a novel than an inspirational allegorical fable, one that has inspired millions of people over the last quarter-century years to stop stumbling through their lives and find their true destinies (I’m sure an equal number of cynics were also inspired to roll their eyes, but 65 million copies sold speak for themselves). For a similarly motivating message in much weirder, 1960s-tinged packaging, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach, is the story of a seagull (yup) who becomes obsessed with mastering the beautiful mechanics of flight, and never stops striving for perfection even after he is cast out of his flock, answering in the affirmative the long-debated question: is Ayn Rand really for the birds?
Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment, by James Patterson, has a killer premise for a series of YA novels. I mean, what kid wouldn’t want to read about genetically-altered kids with big giant wings that give them the ability to soar over the heads of taunting bullies (I mean, theoretically that’s what one could have used them for in, say, 1990 when one was in middle school). Personally, though, I can never think about this series without remembering the book that got there first. Don’t be deterred by its scant page-count or 1980s vintage cover: Mail-Order Wings, a middle grade novel by Beatrice Gormley about a nine-year-old girl who sends away for a “make your own wings” kit advertised in a newspaper ad and is shocked to discover they actually work, has haunted me for decades. The more she wears the wings, she the more birdlike and less human she becomes. Eventually they fuse to her back, her feet start turning to talons, and she flies off in search of the creepy old dude who placed the ad. It isn’t every day you get to describe a book written for 5th graders as “a Kafkaesque nightmare.”
What are you reading?