“Loss is loss is loss”: Embodying the Family-as-Trauma in Julianna Baggott’s Pure (2012)

Julianna Baggott’s Pure trilogy of young adult (YA) dystopian novels, consisting of Pure (2012), Fuse (2013), and Burn (2014) depicts disabled and trans-corporeal bodies resulting from a nuclear disaster. Like The Princess and the Goblin, The Chrysalids, and Waterbound, Pure’s central concern is with social and geographic divisions between those deemed ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’. In contrast, in Pure it is the largely non-normative group of protagonists who resist and fight against normalising, exclusionary society, which is threaded meaningfully with notions of adolescent maturation, as Clare Clark signals in her review of the novel:This tension between safety and domination in the Dome and danger and freedom outside is not new in dystopian YA fiction; however, in Pure, maturation is heavily imbricated in the power dynamics between adults and youth concerning ideal and desired embodiment.