The Season of Light and Darkness
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A girl is woken early from her cryogenic slumber to find the authoritarian rule her family had hoped to escape is still very much in effect in this “chilling” (Kirkus Reviews) young adult dystopian thriller perfect for fans of Divergent and Sunrise on the Reaping.
In the months since a dictator was elected president, the United States has been turned upside down. Dissenters are deemed terrorists, including sixteen-year-old Ellie Jacobs’s family.
To escape persecution, the four of them—Ellie, her younger brother Scott, and their parents—decide to freeze themselves cryogenically for ten years in her father’s lab. In ten years, things will be better. They have to be.
But the government discovers the lab after only three years and thaws Ellie early. She awakens, completely alone, to a nightmare of a strange new world and is told the rest of her family didn’t survive. Suddenly, she must abandon everything she knows to go to through “ReAdmittance” and become “Initiated.” Ellie is terrified…until her boyfriend, Ryan, now a nineteen-year-old Initiated soldier, shows up and tells her everything will be fine, that she should trust the good people around her.
But Ellie isn’t sure if she can still trust Ryan.
What Ellie doesn’t know is that Scott never went through with the freeze. He ran away and has joined a band of teenage resistance fighters living in the mountains. No longer her younger brother, he’s now sixteen just like her. When Scott learns Ellie has been thawed early, he decides he must risk everything to save her before the brainwashing begins.
Together with other brave rebel teens, Ellie and Scott must navigate this terrible new world to find their way back to each other before they lose everything—including who they are.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cantor (The May House, for adults) offers a high-concept dystopian premise that imagines a near-future United States reshaped by authoritarian control. To avoid living under a totalitarian regime following the election of dictatorial politician President Lyon, 17-year-old Ellie, who reads as white, and her family cryogenically freeze themselves. Though she expects to awaken in a decade, Ellie revives early in a radically altered nation. Now dubbed the Lyon States of America, the country has been reshaped by surveillance, propaganda, and strict ideological conformity. Under Lyon's regime, major news outlets have been destroyed, scientific inquiry is criminalized, and citizenship hinges on completing ReAdmission, a mandated educational program designed to enforce state-approved social narratives. Dissenters face imprisonment or death. Elsewhere, Ellie's brother Scott, who avoided cryogenics and now lives in hiding at a rebel camp, learns that Ellie has been awakened ahead of schedule. Fearing she will be indoctrinated, he leaves the locale's relative safety to attempt a rescue. Initially stimulating explorations of memory manipulation and ideological control feel largely glossed over, and frequent POV shifts disrupt momentum and dampen emotional stakes. The result is a partially realized novel with a fascinating foundation. Ages 14–up.
