“The future was only disasters of the past, waiting to happen anew.”Įach book simultaneously moves the story forward as well as backwards, delving deeper into the past to discover, by the third book, what lead William Tear to make a dangerous crossing in the hope of finding a new land upon which to start his socialist colony and what went so wrong afterwards to lead to the situation which opens the first book in the trilogy. As someone who enjoys exploring the political and social ramifications of how dystopias happen as opposed to the actual dystopia itself, the Tearling books were right up my alley, and might just be up yours too. In many ways, Tearling treads the boundary between fantasy and dystopian, for William Tear’s utopian society is (as is often the case) rarely that simple. The land of Tearling represents a utopian project – the mastermind behind it was William Tear, a man who believed in a socialist system which he thought would lead to a more just and happy society, having experienced quite the opposite in America. Spanning three books, Erika Johansen’s Tearling trilogy tells the story of Kelsea Glynn, the exiled Queen of the Tearling who has been raised in secret for many years in order to protect her and her family’s claim to the crown of the kingdom.

Read: 1st-6th Feb | 6th-11th Feb | 11th-19th Feb

The tearling