McMann has wisely geared her book to a slightly younger readership than her usual audience of high schoolers, who might find the premise here a bit overt. As its iron-fisted governess frequently intones, “Quill prevails when the strong survive.”Ĭlearly, “The Unwanteds” is a classic story of good versus evil, with good being defined as independent and imaginative and evil as unquestionably following the rules. By then, their parents and other town members have observed each individual’s tendencies to determine if a child can stay in Quill, with its “identical houses planted closely together like rows of sweet corn,” or needs to be banished.Ĭreativity is perceived as weakness in this dystopian subsistence community. This annual ritual, or purging, takes place when children have reached the inauspicious age of 13. In “The Unwanteds,” every resident in the bland, mostly colorless community of Quill is marked as Necessary, Wanted or Unwanted (if they sing, paint or dance), in which case they are shackled, taken to a death farm and forced to face the Great Lake of Boiling Oil. Take bestselling author Lisa McMann, who brainstormed the concept for her middle-grade debut “The Unwanteds” after art and music classes were cut from her children’s school.Īrtistic kids were being punished, believed McMann, who reimagined their punishment as something other than the real-world decline of imaginative thinking.

Aladdin/Simon & Schuster: 390 pp., $16.99, ages 8-12Īs public school districts across the country get butchered with all the sensitivity inherent to a rusty hatchet, parents are processing the loss in novel ways.

The unwanteds series