When We Wake Review

TITLE When We Wake
AUTHOR Karen Healey
PUBLICATION March 5th 2013 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
READ February 11, 2013
SOURCE Hachette Canada for review

My name is Tegan Oglietti, and on the last day of my first lifetime, I was so, so happy.
Sixteen-year-old Tegan is just like every other girl living in 2027--she's happiest when playing the guitar, she's falling in love for the first time, and she's joining her friends to protest the wrongs of the world: environmental collapse, social discrimination, and political injustice.
But on what should have been the best day of Tegan's life, she dies--and wakes up a hundred years in the future, locked in a government facility with no idea what happened.
Tegan is the first government guinea pig to be cryonically frozen and successfully revived, which makes her an instant celebrity--even though all she wants to do is try to rebuild some semblance of a normal life. But the future isn't all she hoped it would be, and when appalling secrets come to light, Tegan must make a choice: Does she keep her head down and survive, or fight for a better future?
Award-winning author Karen Healey has created a haunting, cautionary tale of an inspiring protagonist living in a not-so-distant future that could easily be our own.

When we wake was a book I knew I had to get my hands on. From the moment I saw the stunning white cover I was so curious about what was inside. I don’t know how many times I have said this but I am going to say it once again, white covers are the best! On a shelf they POP amongst all the blacks & reds. I used to be a sucker for a cover that had red on it but now that is everywhere so it doesn’t get me as excited. I suppose one day this will happen with white covers... hmmm... Anyway, the book, I hadn’t read the blurb so I went into When We Wake blind and what fascinating things I came upon.

Tegan is a girl who lived in the year 2027, she had a loving family, a great best friend and a brand new boyfriend. Upon going to a rally where the Australian Prime Minister is set to speak to protesters she is struck dead in a failed attempt to assassinate the PM. Jump ahead 100 years and Tegan is revived in the year 2028 to find that since she had donated her body to science she had been cryogenically frozen and is the first successful revival ever. I haven’t read a book that touched upon this possibility ever before so it was a welcome surprise to see where this story was headed. As Tegan wakes up she is somewhat of a celebrity, known as The Living Dead Girl. A tangled political web is weaved as a religious group, known as The Inheritors of the Earth want Tegan to kill herself in God’s name, supporters of a No Migrant policy in Australia want her deported because they see her as an immigrant from another time and the government wants her to be a spokesperson for the amazing things that science can do.

I really enjoyed all the different aspects of this story. The world building was great and seeing just how much our current way of life had effected where the world was in 2028 was shocking. Admittedly, I don’t really pay attention to issues such a global warming (I probably should, I know) but this book really opened my eyes to what our children’s futures could look like. Not being fluent in the issue I don’t know how much of what the world looks like in Karen Healey’s future is actually plausible but nevertheless she painted a wonderful picture of a very bleak and frightening future.

When Tegan first woke up after her 100 year coma, she seemed pretty sprite for someone who had been asleep for that long. Immediately she escapes from the lab and is jumping across buildings and running as if she had been working out for those 100 years. This seemed a little weird to me, one would think that she would be pretty incapacitated after staying still for so long. Her escaping wasn’t the only thing that she jumped into head-on, she was a bit of a hot head and was always a getting ahead of herself and doing things without thinking. I liked her though, she questioned everything around her and didn’t just sit back and accept what she was told by the people who brought her back. Her inquisitive personality led her to some shocking findings about the people who woke her up and I enjoyed her amateur methods of finding stuff out. She makes new friends and they have some secrets of their own as well. I really liked Bethari, she was just as quick to jump into tricky situations as Tegan was and they struck up a pretty good friendship. Another really solid relationship in When We Wake is the romance. Tegan and Abdi don’t exactly hit it off right away and their relationship grows nice and slow. I definitely appreciated how their relationship took time to grow and didn’t feel completely random. Their love of music and the situations that they got themselves into brought them together.

The story is told from Tegan as she is doing a podcast as a sort of memoir and telling the world what she has found out since waking up. One thing that did bother me about the execution of the story is how she referred to things as being part of the future. She would say things like “The clothes of the future...” or “The music of the future...” but she is supposed to be doing the podcast for the people living in her time so it didn’t really make sense. She talked as if she was talking to the people of the past at times and it left me feeling disjointed as to the time line of the story.

When We Wake was incredibly unique and full of really great world building. When we find out what is really going on at the heart of all the religious/political drama it definitely gets you curious as to where this story will go in the next instalments. While I did have a few issues with how the story played out this is definitely a series that I will be continuing on with and I think you should give it a shot too!

*Upon preparing my review for the blog I realized that this isn't actually a series and was a standalone.  I had really thought that the end of the book had set up perfectly for more to come and I am sad to see that we won't be getting more!