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A Long, Long Sleep - Anna Sheehan

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This was exactly what I was looking for at the time but also wasn't very great but ALSO seriously, how is this not a 'women's fiction' novel about...I don't know, an unfulfilling marriage and a woman's road to self-discovery? I mean, right?

It's not, though. It's a loose re-telling of Sleeping Beauty. I was hunting for a YA dystopia because I didn't want to have to think very hard (shut up) and HERE IS ONE OF THOSE. Rose has been in stasis for 62 years when Bren wakes her up, and there have been Dark Times and shit, and everyone she knows and loves is dead (along with a lot of the planet [except for all the stuff that regrew, because apparently plague and mass deaths are super good for the environment]).


No one knew that Rose was in stasis, which was how she ended up down there for so long, but now she inherit-owns The Big Corporation That Controls All The Stuff, which sounds GREAT except that errrrrbody at her new high school sucks. Everyone looks at her 'with expressions ranging from selfish curiosity to outright loathing' and Rose, that just sounds like you are determined to make the worst of people, but whatever.

Her only friends are Bren, who had found her stasis tube (and who is mad handsome, and who she later falls in love with because the YA dystopia framework cannot stand unless undergirded by a romance or two [preferably two]), and Bren's friends, one of whom is an alien and who Rose also now owns. The working out of their relationship is actually sort of nuanced and complex.


Oh, and also, a plastic zombie is trying to kill her, which ends up being slightly more frightening than it sounds.

And the book isn't AWful, it's just does those things that books do sometimes when they're like, URRRGH, CORPORATIONS BEHAVING BADLY! ENVIRONMENT BEING THOUGHTLESSLY DISPATCHED! RICH PEOPLE UNIFORMLY AWFUL! WORKING CLASS 'CONSIDERABLY MORE GENUINE' BASED ON THAT ONE TIME I RODE A BUS WITH SOME. It could use some shades of grey, is what I'm saying (a phrase which numbers among the growing list of things 50 Shades has ruined for me).

And, ok, this is why I can't handle YA sometimes, because they are like the Romantics, with all of their FEELINGS and SINCERITY running to odes and apostrophes and overblown metaphors and shit. But 'my love for Xavier was still as sharp and agonizing as a blade, and I was sliced on it' just...it figuratively kills me.

All the Romantics always.

I feel like I should give some credit for this being exactly what I was looking for, but you're always kind of hoping that your foray into, say, YA will end up being a, say, Chaos Walking instead of A Book That I Will Forget I Read In A Year's Time.

Six caterpillars.

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