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Submitted by Anonymous 
(Jan 24, 2006)I thought the book was quite good. It gave an excellent message and showed how we today are not that different from the people of Waknuk. I do believe however, that John Wyndham ruined the ending of the book. He went against everything else he was saying in the book when he made the Sealanders kill both the Waknuk people and the Fringes people. I thought that the ending was a sell-out and Wyndham could have come up with something much better.
Submitted by Angel 
(Jan 10, 2006)This book is truely an amazing read. I was quite aprehensive when it was first introduced through the English class I was taking, but I did read the first chapters as was mandatory and after that I realized I wanted to find out what happened.
I kept reading and I discovered this was very insightful and almost predicting our future. What it depicts is incredible: everything will go >boom< and we will turn our obsession with control inwardly to ourselves and each other rather than nature around us.
A lot of things have happened in the last few years that really pulls to light the amazing things this book shows us. The obsession with perfection and conformity humans exhibit has been demonstrated throughout history, but perhaps with the recent events occuring a parallel could be drawn between the events in the book and those around us.
Wyndham did an incredible job, even though just reading the back of the book would make one think it's another boring school-issue read. Not true. You -have- to read this book! It really makes you think despite your age.
Submitted by Anonymous 
(May 25, 2005)I don't remember when I first read this amazing novel. But I must say I didn't understand it very well. Since then I have read The Chrysalids several times and it affects me much more than I thought possible. I'm very religious myself so when Wyndham talked about Tribulation in such a way and about how man was made in God's image it got me thinking a lot. I really appreciated this book and it has quickly become one of my favourites. I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't read it at least once a year. It helps me be a better person such as the loyalty and friendship David had with his other thought-shape thinkers and with his Uncle Axel. This book really is one of my few favourite and I think everyone should get the chance to read this.
Submitted by Laila
(Jun 20, 2004)We read this book in the English literature class for the first half of the 8. grade.
The vast majority of my class did not have a clue to what the story was really about. Although a few of kids got the concept right away but for others it took sometime for the others to click. We had a great time with this book At the end o f a chapter we would get in groups and make up a name for the chapter and then we would vote. Some were really good and it was fun. We also were given a month to create a game based on the Chrysalids and they are so cool. We got to make up rules and we got to make up cards with question's and we had an awesome time.
It is a very deep novel. It is so realistic, this could have happened for real during the Cold War. All of mankind could have been destroyed, and everything could have been reduced to barely recognizable organisms. Wyndham is a genius at depicting this theory.
The book not only defines the possibilities of life but also the attitude of cruel heartless people willing to kill their own children for not being "normal". The sinister side of mankind is drawn so realistically and detailed that it makes it very easy to fall into the plot of the story. You could feel the hatred flowing through the veins of the hateful, the pulsing adrenaline in the rushing characters. The system of regulation is clearly defined in this book.
The grammar is a little confusing but if you have a good dictionary and patience you could understand it quite well. Maybe not perfectly because the book is written to make you think, to let your opinion rise to the surface and mix with that of the author and the book. The book itself is more of a philosophical book. The mind is a tedious thing. Only you can control it. But your soul is another thing, and your souls is what the book is talking to.
Even the Zealand woman's speeches are informative. The attitude of two peoples, the WAKNUK AND THE ZEALANDERS, so different in beliefs but so similar when it comes to ideas and philosophy. The Waknuk's think so high of their effort to control the deviations, and the Zealanders think they are the superior race of the two.
John Wyndham displays the sufferings of all the characters so well that you would think he was a telepathic person and that he had gone through things like this for being different for real. What is more interesting about this book is the attitude of the Waknuk people towards deviation which can also be found here in the very world that we live in. There has always been discrimination against those with different ethnicity, language, culture, education, religion. I RECOMMEND THE CHRYSALIDS FOR THE WORLD TO READ.
Submitted by Lynda
(Aug 01, 2003)I first read The Chrysalids when I was 16, would have done so a lot sooner given the chance, but my mother would not let me up till then. She thought it might be too old for me.
Well, it was an unforgettable treat for me when I did. That is the strange thing about certain kinds of science fiction - and I do not by that mean the spaghetti gung-ho kind of read, I mean the ones which speculate most about where human beings are going. Certain kinds of SF seem to address certain areas of interest of mine so keenly, it is almost as if the writer were directly addressing a fellow Chrysalid, Cuckoo, or a Chocky. Other writers whom I admire for similar reasons include Philip K Dick, Phyliss Gottlieb, JG Ballard, Robert Silverberg and Michael Moorcock, to name just a few.
There is the pessimism about where technology is heading, the fascination of following a world, whilst futuristic, has been rendered archaic by its desruction of an inadequate race gone insane, as the Sealand character so eloquently puts it, as she views a ruined Northern Hemisphere from the safety of her cockpit. The way Uncle Axel depicts the horror of the Badlands, where genetic mutations in a poisoned world have gone wild, is particularly evocative.
Brian Aldiss would no doubt sympathise, it is all pretty gothic. He did something similar in his own novel Greybeard, of course.
I should think that current concerns about the prosecution of anything different is all too topical currently too: human nature does not change that much after all, as any child with either physical or mental handicaps can surely testify, through ensuing generations of bullying at school. Did Wyndham have a close relative with Asgerger,s for example?
But The Chrysalids can also work nicely as Gnostic parable too, it could be read as a handbook of rebellion for all those who might hold a sneaking dislike of the rule and might of Jehovah and Caesar.Or at least of the consequences which come from holding such narrow views of the world in a religious sense. The Middle Ages are not so far back in the past even now, with the atrocities committed against generations of hapless witches.
So the book rebels against the sheer cruelty of those who hold rigid views on what is Right and Normal, even whilst it is shown that this so-called Normal is a dinosaur. No doubt the Freudians and Jungians are twitching in their graves too, as they wag their heads over yet another slaying and overtrowing of the omnipotent, dictatarial Father, and the world of the Fathers.
Wyndham of course, was probably thinking more of Darwin and of selfish genes - sympathetic are the persecuted Outsider Chrysalids of this book, but less so are the superior Freaks of The Midwich Cuckoos. Neither is this book all black and white: David Strorm the nattator has his doubts about the self-assured arrogance shown by the Sealand woman towards the community in which he grew up, however cruel and rigid it was, and where would Uncle Axel with his own wisdom figure within the brave new world of Sealand?
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