Sleeping Beauty wakes up to a future world where everyone she ever knew is gone.
Dramatic disasters, diseases and technological advancements have passed during Rosalinda Fitzroy's decades of sleep. In her new role as long-lost heiress to the interplanetary business empire UniCorp, she faces a new world without her family or boyfriend. History lessons hit too close to home at school, and she fails to connect with anyone but Bren, the son of top UniCorp officials and discoverer of her stasis tube, and Otto, the result an unethical UniCorp experiment. The science-fiction elements here are tantalizing but under-explored and under-utilized. Before Rose can fix the mistakes of her parents' company, she needs to fix their parenting mistakes. Rose's first-person narration paints the picture of a girl too accommodating and self-deprecating for her social position. Gradually, her quirks are explained through the mystery of her placement into stasis. Futuristic slang words jar, and the passages don't always mesh well—the all-too-possible descriptions of what went wrong while Rose slept are chilling but not always well-integrated into the story, and the breaks from Rose's point-of-view into that of a mysterious second character are forced. Assassination attempts against Rose feel tacked on to bump up the tension, though they are eventually tied into her emotional story arc.
Thoughtful but uneven. (Science fiction. 14 & up)
