Glory O'Brien's History of the Future

Summary:
Glory's mom committed suicide when she was four years old. She's about to graduate from high school and while everyone else is making plans for their future, she wonders if she will even have one, or if she'll die like her mom. One night, she and her only friend drink the remains of a petrified bat and they gain the power to see the past and the future of the people around them. The future she sees is full of war and erosion of women's rights. As she works to try to prevent that future, she learns about her own past and that of her family.

Strengths:
King's story is rooted in a realistic world but with a little bit of magic mixed in. This element of almost realism is intriguing and interesting. The theme of the book focuses on feminism and the idea that doing nothing can sometimes cause great harm. Glory is without direction until the visions begin and she realizes that doing nothing will cause a whole lot of terrible somethings to happen. The idea that women's rights would be quickly taken away may seem far fetched at first, but one only has to look at post-Revolutionary Iran to see that this sort of thing can happen very quickly.

More books by A.S. King:

As I Crawl Through It
Please Ignore Vera Dietz

King, A. (2014). Glory O'Brien's history of the future: A novel. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company.

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