When We Wake is New Zealand author Karen Healey’s third novel, after Guardian of the Dead and The Shattering. It’s an excellent YA novel. It’s also really excellent science fiction: I stayed awake far later than I would otherwise have done to finish it.
In 2027, sixteen-year-old Tegan Oglietti dies. A hundred years in the future, her cryonically preserved body is revived by the Australian military—the first successful cryonic revival. The Girl Who Died is an instant celebrity and the government’s favourite guinea pig. All she wants to do is grieve her old life and try to build some semblance of a “normal” new one, but with her footsteps dogged by the media, a fundamentalist sect who believes she should commit suicide, and a minor case of futureshock, it’s not that easy. But Tegan’s stubborn. She goes to school, she makes friends. Bethari, the army-brat young journalist. Joph, the brilliant chemistry student walking around in a haze of her own creations. Abdi, the talented musician from Somalia who’s almost as much an outsider as Tegan is in immigrant-hostile 22nd-century Australia.
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