The Last Book In The Universe

The protagonist and narrator of The Last Book in the Universe is a teen boy with epilepsy. Why do you think Philbrick chose to focus this text on a young adult with a neurological disorder? More specifically, how did his decision directly affect the text?

Rather than writing a realistic book set on Earth at the time of its publication, Philbrick wrote a dystopian novel set several hundred years in the future, after a cataclysmic event. What can the audience learn from reading dystopic fiction? What is the author able to do within this setting that a traditional novel would not be able to achieve?

The plot of this book carries the reader across four different “latches” and finally into Eden. How does Spaz differentiate these locations from one another? What do each of these settings add to the reader’s understanding of class structure?