When We Wake by Karen Healey

When We Wake
Author- Karen Healy
Publishing Date- March 5th, 2013
Little, Brown
304 pages
Received through ATW ARC Tours

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?

 

I knew from the minute that I viewed this gorgeous cover on a tour site that I need to read this book. I mean, how could you pass up a cover as fantastic as this one? I love the clean lines and simplistic colors. I also love the cool frost that is shown on the cover models lips, eyes and eyebrows. Overall, this cover is definitely a winner for me.

This book reminded me quite a bit of Across the Universe, a book I read much earlier in 2012 and ended up loving!  In When We Wake, people who have chosen to donate their bodies to science upon death are cryonically frozen and preserved in hopes of being brought back in another era. Tegan, the main character, however, is the first ever person to ever fully awaken from her cryonic state.

I don't know what it was about Tegan, but I found her to be sort of bland and very dull. She was easy to relate to in the beginning of the book, but towards the end I ended up really disliking her. As a main character, I would have expected to like her much more than I actually did. She definitely was very unique and seemed to have a great layer to her that wasn't really seen much in the book.

Tegan's love interest, Abdi, was quite a different case though.. I really ended up loving Abdi. He was extremely like able and I looked forward to the parts of the story that featured him. He had an interesting life story and was very unique. I just wish that his partner could have been just like him!

The way When We Wake is written is in a very conversational manner. I felt like Tegan was always talking to me instead of narrating the story. I actually ended up really liking the conversational aspect of the book. It made the storyline flow and the pages just flew by.

Overall, I enjoyed When We Wake, but it definitely wouldn't be the first dystopian I would recommend to you. I think what really ended up killling it for me was the fact that Tegan was just so darn boring. Other than her, I really liked the other characters and the setting was really cool too!