In my student teaching I had to start the beginning of this unit. I was able to come up with some pretty fun activities for the students including creating their own "perfect" society and what kind of issues they might face in the creation of this society. 
 This book is a really good satire and allegory of the Russian Revolution and it was insanely easy to compare the characters to real people who took part in the revolution including Lenin and Trotsky. Looking at the book away from my teacher's prospective, I would have to say that the book was okay at best and the plot moved very quickly. I was able to read this book in a matter of a few hours. You couldn't really become very attached to any character (which might have been deliberate) and overall it was written poorly (might have been all the typos from the edition I read). This is a great book if you want an example of allegory, but the quality was something to be lacked.