The Chrysalids

I read this perhaps more than once in the 1960s and/or 1970s, but I don't think I read it again until just recently. It's a dystopian story, and I tend to avoid dystopias, because I like to be happy, and dystopias don't cheer me up.

I managed to plod through this one. Fortunately, it's a short novel, and there's a happy ending.

The dystopia is actually quite interesting and thought-provoking, although it's set in a far future that none of us will see, apparently long after a nuclear war devastated most of North America at least, and probably most of the rest of the world. The world is very slowly recovering, and humanity is very slowly recovering too, but the small community we visit has a religious dread of mutations, even those that are harmless or possibly beneficial.

The happy ending is flawed in a couple of ways, which I may not have noticed when I read the story long ago.

1. Only three of the characters actually benefit from it.2. The rescuers from far-away New Zealand could just have been nice people, and that would have made a pleasant ending. Instead, they turn out to be as ruthless in their way as the society that the chrysalids are fleeing. I don't see what good that does to the story.

This is a fairly memorable book (I still remembered the outline of the story some 50 years after last reading it), well done in some ways, and I was thinking of giving it three stars, but the flawed ending deprives me of a full reward for plodding through the dystopia, so I'll give it two.