Bleak Houses and Secret Cities: Alternative Communities in Young Adult Fiction1

This essay examines novels in which children or teens in an urban environment, left on their own for a variety of reasons (such as poverty, war, plague, nuclear disaster, or technological breakdown), join together to form a community that explores alternative versions of home and family. The urban survival novel, to distinguish it from the more popular wilderness survival story, encompasses a wide variety of genres, including fantasy, satire, science fiction, social realism, and historical fiction. These novels involve dramatic shifts of perspective—inside/outside, above/below, before/after— which challenge protagonists (and readers) to see the world around them differently and to confront other points of view. The 1970s ushered in a wave of urban survival fiction that has continued to the present; I speculate on why these survival scenarios have proved so compelling for young adult readers.