Rating: 4/5
Review:
Well written, thoughtful and gripping
I enjoyed this book far more than I expected to. I am most definitely not in its target audience, being male, a very long way past my teens and not much of a reader of science fiction. However, I found it well written, thoughtful and gripping, and I am glad that I tried it.
The premise of the book is that, a couple of centuries into the future, a sixteen-year-old girl called Rose wakes from stasis to find she has been asleep for over sixty years and that the world she knew is greatly changed. This gives rise to some insightful stuff about alienation, friendship, falsehood and reality, the nature of freedom and so on, as well as an interesting and ultimately very exciting story. There is some slightly clunky green-is-good and corporate-is-bad stuff which jarred a bit on me even though I am in considerable sympathy with the basic ideas, but in the main I found it an engaging and intelligent read.
The writing is excellent, with elegant, readable and unflashy prose, and a fairly small cast of believable characters whose relationships ring very true. The story is also very well crafted: the truth of Rose's past emerges at a perfect pace and the narrative itself is involving, gripping and sometimes very moving.
In short, this is a good story, well told. It will certainly appeal to young adults, but also has a lot in it for not-at-all-young adults like me and I recommend it warmly.
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