Content levels
Trigger warnings
Positive tags
Protagonist archetypes
Themes
Synopsis
With deliberately vague and vivid descriptions, the narrator describes a mid-summer festival in the utopian town of Omelas, whose prosperity depends on one boy's perpetual misery. Those Who Leave Omelas was nominated for the Locus Award for Best Short Story in 1974 and won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in the same year.
Is The ones who walk away from Omelas appropriate for my child?
Suitable for most readers 13 and up.
This philosophical allegory explores the moral cost of utopia through the suffering of a single child locked in darkness, raising profound ethical questions without graphic content but with disturbing implications.
What to know going in
This book has mild violence, no sexual content, and clean language. Content notes include child abuse, child harm, emotional abuse, and captivity.
Who'll love this
Teens will wrestle with powerful ethical questions about what kind of world is worth living in when it requires one person's suffering.