Wakers
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Ender’s Game comes a brand-new series following a teen who wakes up on an abandoned Earth to discover that he’s a clone.
Laz is a side-stepper: a teen with the incredible power to jump his consciousness to alternate versions of himself in parallel worlds. All his life, there was no mistake that a little side-stepping couldn’t fix.
Until Laz wakes up one day in a cloning facility on a seemingly abandoned Earth.
Laz finds himself surrounded by hundreds of other clones, all dead, and quickly realizes that he too must be a clone of his original self. Laz has no idea what happened to the world he remembers as vibrant and bustling only yesterday, and he struggles to survive in the barren wasteland he’s now trapped in. But the question that haunts him isn’t why was he created, but instead, who woke him up…and why?
There’s only a single bright spot in Laz’s new life: one other clone appears to still be alive, although she remains asleep. Deep down, Laz believes that this girl holds the key to the mysteries plaguing him, but if he wakes her up, she’ll be trapped in this hellscape with him.
This is one problem that Laz can’t just side-step his way out of.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this concept-focused trilogy opener, Card (Duplex) presents a slow-moving, dialogue-heavy exploration of metaphysics and alternate timelines. When 17-year-old, Armenian-descended Lazarus Davit Hayerian wakes up in an empty cloning facility in Greensboro, N.C., his unique gift—"side stepping" into alternate timestreams in which he already exists—offers little to explain how he arrived there from California, or why the empty city seems to have been deserted for years. After awakening the only other sleeper in the facility, Latinx Ivy Maisie Downey—the sole person able to sense alternate timelines without visiting them—the two theorize that they must have been cloned and abandoned, possibly for a reason ("Only two clones were alive in the whole orchard. One was you, the other was me"). Navigating an immediate personality clash, the two work to layer their powers while struggling to survive in a dire landscape. While the premise has potential, thin plotting—which focuses almost exclusively on Laz and Ivy's snarky interactions—saps it of urgency, even as the two clumsily navigate a seemingly ending world and a blossoming relationship. The result reads more as extended thought exercise than engaging adventure. Ages 14–up.
