LATEST UPDATES



February 1, 2025
Updated Convention Listings


January
Book Pick
of the Month




January 15
New reviews in
The Book Nook,
The Illustrated Corner,
Nana's Nook,and
Odds & Ends and
Voices From the Past



January 1, 2025
Updated Convention Listings


Previous Updates

WesternSFA


The Awoken
by Katelyn Monroe Howes
Dutton/Penguin Random House, $26.00, 403pp
Published July 2022

This is a debut novel and a very worthy effort.  It’s about challenging the perception of ethics and bias, driven by politics and big business.

Alabine discovered she had terminal cancer at the tender age of twenty-three.  An age where all things are possible.  But Alabine didn’t die alone, she died loved.  She and Max were together at the end when she chose to be cryogenically frozen anticipating a mere gap of a few years while medical technology caught up to her type of cancer.  Max seemed to have the harder road; forced to continue living without the love of his life. 

As medical technology did advance, some people were “thawed out” and returned to society but met with both political and societal barriers.  A new political party had emerged and found ways to draw diverse groups of people together under their banner.  With that power came great change in how society represented men and women; returning the country to a time where the home was sacred and women responsible for maintaining it.  Under this banner, people were led to be fearful of the Awoken people and laws were inevitably passed to deny them citizenship.  And, as with most underdog causes, an underground rose up to defend those vulnerable corpsicles.

Alabine was awoken by such a group; terrorists in their own way.  But when everyone else in the country was howling for her death, they seemed like reasonable people.  She was joined with other people freshly awoken.  At first she just saw herself as a randomly chosen lottery winner in the game of life.  She struggled to understand a world that was 125 years removed from her own.  But as she was tossed from city to city, staying ahead of a government determined to kill them all, she began to get an idea that she and her other awoken friends were not random choices.  What and who they were determined the choice to awake them.  But she isn’t prepared for the ‘who’ she became after her death; it was a very large billboard with her name that spelled it out for her.  Apparently, Max spent his life defending her right to live and made her an icon for people to rally around; she became a political pawn.

She was determined to help the people who saved her; especially since everyone she ever knew was dead and the government painted her as a non-person.  But the ante went up when government agents managed to contact her and held out the one prize that would ensure she would betray her comrades:  Max lived to be cryogenically frozen, as well.  But the clock is ticking.  The government is expecting a ruling from the Supreme Court that will allow them to finally demolish every existing cryo unit and all the clients still within.

This was an entertaining and fairly quick read.  I like the message Howes gave – how we allow politics and business to get into our heads and direct our beliefs.  Alabine’s new world isn’t much different from ours and it was fun to see how Howes used public media to drive her story.  In this almost dystopian society, social media has disappeared. People get the news that the government wants them to see.  But Alabine finds a way to use that against the government to get her message out to the people.  It was fun.

The author uses a macguffin to bring the reader up to speed with Max’s influence after her death.  Apparently, when she was frozen she was implanted with a hynoptic sort of recording that was triggered with a special word.  Anytime Alabine felt disconnected or frightened or lonely, she could trigger a memory with the word.  But they weren’t her memories; it was more like watching a news story or a play.  She could watch history that happened after she died.  It added to the story’s entertainment value.

The story had a good plot, the pacing was good, and Alabine was a sympathetic character although the rest of the characters, including Max, were rather one-dimensional.  And there was a good resolution; a satisfying ending.  All-in-all, I was impressed with this debut book.  I hope to see the author stretch a bit more in her next effort.   ~~  Catherine Book

Follow us

for notices on new content and events.
or

or
Instagram or


to The Nameless Zine,
a publication of WesternSFA



WesternSFA
Main Page


Calendar
of Local Events


Disclaimer

Copyright ©2005-2025 All Rights Reserved
(Note that external links to guest web sites are not maintained by WesternSFA)
Comments, questions etc. email WebMaster