When We Wake, by Karen Healey (review)

It's been 100 years since sixteen-year-old Tegan Oglietti died, so it's a rough adjustment for her to wake up in a hospital in Melbourne in 2128, the first successful revival in a government cryogenics experiment. Now she's the Living Dead Girl, poster child for Operation New Beginning and target of political and religious zealots who despise her very existence. As she tries to adjust to this completely different world, attending school, making friends, and perhaps finding a little romance, she begins to suspect that the government's cryogenics program may not be what it seems. Before she can uncover anything incriminating, she is captured by the Inheritors of the Earth, an anti-government group that threatens her life. A provocative blend of bleakness and hope, this is a suspenseful, thought-provoking story of a young woman thrust into the heart of her world's most controversial issues. Healey tackles a variety of complicated problems here, including environmental, political, and even metaphysical concerns, but she manages to avoid moralizing. Instead, Tegan's unique, emotionally authentic voice makes the global issues feel personal, and readers will appreciate her desire to stay out of the conflict even as they root for her to change the world. Fans of Revis' Across the Universe (BCCB 1/11) will enjoy this vision of cryogenics before it achieved space-flight, while those who relished Healey's more supernatural novels (The Shattering, BCCB 11/11, etc.) will be glad they followed her into the realm of science fiction.