Black Glass - Meg Mundell
Black Glass by Meg Mundell definitely met the Australian Women Writers Challenge to read outside my comfort zone. Dystopian YA with no guarantee of a happy ending? To prove I’m no coward I cracked open the book (thanks to my local library for getting in a copy ) and started reading.

It was good. Vivid writing with sharp landscapes and characters. The jagged scene and point of view switches helped to build the mood of a disjointed world.

Black Glass is a dream of the future where the only salvation is in committing to a relationship. People survive within a society structured to destroy them.

Maybe it’s a theme for all dystopian novels (maybe you’ve gathered I don’t read them much), but I noticed the issue of morality — of creating and abiding by something — seemed fairly explicit.

It was the little points — like the difficulty of clean drinking water — that made Black Glass so compelling. This was an ordinary world with big and little dramas. The big ideas drove the story, but it’s the details that make you care.

The scary thing was how easy it is to see today’s Australia in Black Glass.