The Chrysalids

"If you run away from a thing just
because you don't like it, you don't
like what you find either."

Title: The Chrysalids

Author: John Wyndham

First Published: 1955


Series: Stand-alone

Genre: Classic, Dystopia

Available As: Paperback, hardcover, ebook

My Rating: 7.5/10

Watch thou for the mutant! These phrases has stuck with David all his life. Anyone found with a deviation must be killed. At first, David believes in this saying, but as the years go by, he slowly by slowly loses his faith. He just doesn't understand! What makes them so different, just because of a small physical difference? Until David realises he also has a
deviation. And everything is now at stake.

Reading The Chrysalids was like a taste of fresh dystopia. It was told a bit differently from the dystopian books we read nowadays. It is almost scary how much Wyndham was close to predicting how our world is like now.

David started off as a young, naive boy in the beginning. He blindly accepted everything that was happening, even when he knew it was wrong. Throughout the book, he slowly opens his mind more and more to the world around him, and he finally understands how it is wrong to live the way he has lived all his life.

One thing irked me in the book though. Why does David have to fall in love with Rosalind? And vice versa? But I guess, love is love and there is no controlling it.

The ending is an open ending. We never really find out what happens to all the characters (do we ever?), and all we know is that most of them will get their happy ending. This was a really good dystopian book, written about half a century ago. Does it remind us of our world today? In some ways, it does. These older dystopian books aren't really just for enjoyment (although it can be), but rather some kind of foreshadowing, if we're assuming our whole existence is like a book. Foreshadowing for a future that is yet to come.