The 30 million fans of the blockbuster YA series have been asking: Where is Maximum Ride? Ten years ago a girl with wings fought to save the world. But then she disappeared. Now she’s just a fading legend, remembered only in stories. Hawk doesn’t know her real name. She doesn’t know who her family was, or where they went. But destiny is coming for her—a destiny that forces her to take flight. But it’s not a rescue mission. It’s an execution. Fly—and fight—in Hawk and the sequel, coming this November, City of the Dead. Not all dystopias are far off places where society has broken down into well-delineated factions based on some arbitrary distinction. Not everyone gets to be the Chosen One in these stories — some of these characters are just doing their best to survive in a system that is not set up for that. There are heroes, but there are also villains and sometimes it isn’t clear which one is which. In this list, we have characters contending with an omnipresent social feed that is constantly advertising to them, schools that aren’t really schools at all, and people living with the consequences of wars they did not ask for. It is not hard to draw a line from their lives to ours and hopefully that encourages readers to make what changes they can in our world.
