Andra

Sometime in the future a young girl recieves an eye transplant that will change her world forever. She lives underground with everyone else. No one has lived on the surface of the planet for hundreds of years, so no one remembers what the sky looks like, or trees. And yet, Andra's new eyes remember. She begins to see things and begins a movement to find a way to the surface.

Originally read this as a teen and the ending and the cover stuck with me, as an unusually bleak ending for a YA book of the time (though it was issued when the YA category didn't even exist in publishing and was just shelved in the children's library at my local library). Saw a secondhand copy of this original first edition hardbook a while back - with the abstract painting of Andra with her long hair shown here, totally unlike the paperback cover. Re-read it in one sitting, it is an easy read, and could now see all the flaws not apparent when younger. Won't include spoilers here but one quite unbelievable scene is where they see a film of a distant planet they want to colonise, and the vegetation is identical to earth down to all the show more various fruits and grains etc. There are quite a few other 'clangers' from a science fiction viewpoint. I agree with other reviews that Andra's character is rather 'fey' and erratic to a rather annoying degree and that the story is very much from various male viewpoints, odd for a book with a central female character. But it also illustrates that the dystopia genre in YA is a lot older than Hunger Games. show less

Sometime in the future a young girl recieves an eye transplant that will change her world forever. She lives underground with everyone else. No one has lived on the surface of the planet for hundreds of years, so no one remembers what the sky looks like, or trees. And yet, Andra's new eyes remember. She begins to see things and begins a movement to find a way to the surface.