Themes In Bethany Wiggins's 'Stung'

Bethany Wiggins’s young adult fantasy Stung, based on the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty, takes place in a dystopian world, a future Earth, created by an overreach of science. Fiona fell asleep as a thirteen-year-old, but when she wakes, she is in the body of a seventeen-year-old. When she fell asleep, her world was under threat, but she lacked the understanding necessary to save it. However, when she wakes, the worst has happened—all the bees have died, which has led to a worldwide pandemic.
Colorado, where Fiona lives, has been demolished; people are living in chaos. Fiona finds a tattoo—an oval with five digits on each side—on her hand that she cannot remember getting. Even though Fiona does not know what the tattoo is for, she knows she has to keep it hidden. In this new world, children are not the hope for the future, but rather its doom—one out of every ten children is marked. That is what the tattoo represents.
When she realizes her brother has become a monster, Fiona runs away to try to find a semblance of her life before her world was destroyed. As she leaves home, Fiona finds the world around her divided. Beyond a

In the novel, the conflict is caused because all the bees in the world die. If that were to happen, not only would a major pollinator disappear from the earth, thus destroying fauna throughout the world, but animals that rely on bees as part of the food chain would also suffer. In Stung, the absence of the bees leads to a pandemic, which scientists then try to solve with a vaccine. However, the vaccine turns children into beasts instead of curing them of the disease that threatens to engulf the entire human race. Finally, at the end of the book, a successful vaccine is discovered, allowing science to mitigate some of the damage it caused—but that does not change or excuse the fact that pesticides and vaccines nearly caused the extinction of humans as well as other