Jay Parini, who wrote a blog post on teenage interest in YA lit in 2011, suggests that young adult readers turn to dystopian novels as a way to escape the stifling world of standardized testing and the watchful eye of the system as a whole. To teenagers, this “system” works to turn them into adults and to “separate the sheep from the goats.” While I do agree that current dystopian novels work so well because they take aspects of reality–such as an ever-present surveillance system–and makes the audience think about the real world, I do believe that the popularity of such books stems from interest with the genre itself without feeling “trapped” by the system that they are in. Even with the example of The Hunger Games, its massive popularity stemmed from various reasons (strong female protagonist, romantic plot that surfaces in the midst of the novel’s chaos, and the Battle Royale-style of picking a group of young adults to fight to the death); finding that as any “escape” from the world of standardized tests, Facebook status updates, and demanding adult figures could only work to explain a handful of novels in the genre.