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sophia_sol) wrote2018-06-30 12:47 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2018-06-30 12:47 pm
A Long, Long Sleep, by Anna Sheehan
This is a YA scifi novel loosely based on the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty. And...it's a lot more interesting than I expected going in!
Rose, the main character, is 16. But she's spent her whole life regularly being temporarily put in stasis, so it's been a lot more years than 16 since she was born. When she wakes from stasis at the beginning of the book, she thinks it's a time like all the others, but soon learns she's inexplicably been in stasis for many decades. Her family is all dead and the world is changed. Now she has to mourn the life she left behind and learn to make her way in this new world.
I have a few minor quibbles about the book but overall: I'm really impressed. I found Rose and her complicated relationships with the various other characters in the book really compelling.
Like for one thing, it's a book where the main character has three potential love interests and ends the book having complicated yet non-romantic relationships with all three of them and it's SO INTERESTING. I'm most interested though in the relationships with Xavier and Otto of the three.
Xavier is a boy Rose has been having a complicated relationship with for nearly her whole life. He's born when she's about seven years old, but because she keeps being put in temporary stasis, by the time she's 15 years old he's a similar age to her. So at first he's like a little brother to her. Then he's her best friend. And then he's her boyfriend and first love. And then when she meets him again in the future he's old enough to be her grandfather! And obviously things are, uh, difficult between them because of what's happened in the intervening years, but their relationship has weathered changes to its nature in the past and will again, and the main constant is that they will always love each other in some way. This is incredible and I love it. Relationships are complicated! Sometimes they evolve in unexpected directions! Time-related shenanigans fuck people up! BUT LOVE REMAINS.
And Otto is a genetic experiment who's part alien and is owned by the company Rose wakes up to discover she's technically the head of, and he has gone through a lot of difficult things, and he and Rose are able to connect with each other in ways not many people are willing to connect with either of them since they're both kind of seen as freaks. Also Otto can't speak verbally and is a touch-telepath who doesn't like touching Rose because of what's in her brain. But they still manage to be close friends! IT'S GREAT. I love Otto a lot.
But this book is also a really heartbreaking look at child abuse, though the reader doesn't get enough of the details to put this together until well into the book. Rose has wealthy and successful parents who want their child only when everything's easy and nice. So if they need to leave on a business trip or a vacation, they put her in stasis until they return. If Rose is ever inconvenient, they put her in stasis until having a child around would no longer be inconvenient. If Rose is misbehaving, they put her in stasis for her to calm down. If Rose tries to disagree with them about anything, they put her in stasis until their unilateral decisions can't be unmade.
So Rose learns to be perfectly pliant to her parents' every wish, because it's the only way to be able to have any life whatsoever. And she thinks that all this is justifiable, because it's the only kind of life she knows, and she thinks she deserved it because she's too emotional, and she can't quite wrap her mind around the idea that it's not right to treat a child that way even when another character tells her so.
But Rose survives and gets through, and eventually in the future with her parents long dead she learns that the coping mechanisms she used as a child are no longer helpful, and she learns that her needs and wants are worthwhile, and she gets to have multiple people in her life who genuinely care about her for who she is! Also she gets to full-on destroy the murder robot her parents had once upon a time set up to go after her if Rose ever tried to run away from them and their control. And she uses her old stasis pod to enact that destruction - poetic justice.
(Also: We don't get to see much of Åsa, the maid/nurse/babysitter from the era when Rose tries to rebel against her parents a little bit, but I love her so much because she sees and recognizes that what's happening to Rose is wrong and then does EVERYTHING SHE CAN to support Rose within that household even though she surely knows that if Rose's parents ever found out then Åsa would be in ENORMOUS trouble with two of the most powerful people in the world and that can't be safe. I hope Åsa was okay. Though I mean...probably she wasn't, statistically, given the plagues and stuff that followed shortly thereafter, even if she survived Rose's parents. *sadface*)
ANYWAY all in all I loved the book a lot and had a lot of feelings.
My aforementioned quibbles, in case you're curious:
- One of the characters mentions to Rose that when she speaks she sounds funnily old-fashioned, buuuuut all of the dialogue, both from Rose and from the future-people, just sounds regular and current-modern except for like four pieces of made-up future slang that then get overused. Which makes the bits of slang stand out awkwardly all the more, and makes the explicit mention of ways of speaking seem like a bad idea on the author's part. Not everyone's capable of inventing the future of language and that's fine, but maybe don't call attention to it if it's not your thing? The use of language kept on tripping me up, honestly.
- I have trouble believe all the worldbuilding history things. Like the genetically engineered corn that left much of the human population accidentally infertile because it's the kind of seed that's intended to not produce fertile offspring? I don't know huge amounts about genetic engineering or human biology but that seems, uh, scientifically implausible.
But everything else was good enough to absolutely be worth reading past these things.
Rose, the main character, is 16. But she's spent her whole life regularly being temporarily put in stasis, so it's been a lot more years than 16 since she was born. When she wakes from stasis at the beginning of the book, she thinks it's a time like all the others, but soon learns she's inexplicably been in stasis for many decades. Her family is all dead and the world is changed. Now she has to mourn the life she left behind and learn to make her way in this new world.
I have a few minor quibbles about the book but overall: I'm really impressed. I found Rose and her complicated relationships with the various other characters in the book really compelling.
Like for one thing, it's a book where the main character has three potential love interests and ends the book having complicated yet non-romantic relationships with all three of them and it's SO INTERESTING. I'm most interested though in the relationships with Xavier and Otto of the three.
Xavier is a boy Rose has been having a complicated relationship with for nearly her whole life. He's born when she's about seven years old, but because she keeps being put in temporary stasis, by the time she's 15 years old he's a similar age to her. So at first he's like a little brother to her. Then he's her best friend. And then he's her boyfriend and first love. And then when she meets him again in the future he's old enough to be her grandfather! And obviously things are, uh, difficult between them because of what's happened in the intervening years, but their relationship has weathered changes to its nature in the past and will again, and the main constant is that they will always love each other in some way. This is incredible and I love it. Relationships are complicated! Sometimes they evolve in unexpected directions! Time-related shenanigans fuck people up! BUT LOVE REMAINS.
And Otto is a genetic experiment who's part alien and is owned by the company Rose wakes up to discover she's technically the head of, and he has gone through a lot of difficult things, and he and Rose are able to connect with each other in ways not many people are willing to connect with either of them since they're both kind of seen as freaks. Also Otto can't speak verbally and is a touch-telepath who doesn't like touching Rose because of what's in her brain. But they still manage to be close friends! IT'S GREAT. I love Otto a lot.
But this book is also a really heartbreaking look at child abuse, though the reader doesn't get enough of the details to put this together until well into the book. Rose has wealthy and successful parents who want their child only when everything's easy and nice. So if they need to leave on a business trip or a vacation, they put her in stasis until they return. If Rose is ever inconvenient, they put her in stasis until having a child around would no longer be inconvenient. If Rose is misbehaving, they put her in stasis for her to calm down. If Rose tries to disagree with them about anything, they put her in stasis until their unilateral decisions can't be unmade.
So Rose learns to be perfectly pliant to her parents' every wish, because it's the only way to be able to have any life whatsoever. And she thinks that all this is justifiable, because it's the only kind of life she knows, and she thinks she deserved it because she's too emotional, and she can't quite wrap her mind around the idea that it's not right to treat a child that way even when another character tells her so.
But Rose survives and gets through, and eventually in the future with her parents long dead she learns that the coping mechanisms she used as a child are no longer helpful, and she learns that her needs and wants are worthwhile, and she gets to have multiple people in her life who genuinely care about her for who she is! Also she gets to full-on destroy the murder robot her parents had once upon a time set up to go after her if Rose ever tried to run away from them and their control. And she uses her old stasis pod to enact that destruction - poetic justice.
(Also: We don't get to see much of Åsa, the maid/nurse/babysitter from the era when Rose tries to rebel against her parents a little bit, but I love her so much because she sees and recognizes that what's happening to Rose is wrong and then does EVERYTHING SHE CAN to support Rose within that household even though she surely knows that if Rose's parents ever found out then Åsa would be in ENORMOUS trouble with two of the most powerful people in the world and that can't be safe. I hope Åsa was okay. Though I mean...probably she wasn't, statistically, given the plagues and stuff that followed shortly thereafter, even if she survived Rose's parents. *sadface*)
ANYWAY all in all I loved the book a lot and had a lot of feelings.
My aforementioned quibbles, in case you're curious:
- One of the characters mentions to Rose that when she speaks she sounds funnily old-fashioned, buuuuut all of the dialogue, both from Rose and from the future-people, just sounds regular and current-modern except for like four pieces of made-up future slang that then get overused. Which makes the bits of slang stand out awkwardly all the more, and makes the explicit mention of ways of speaking seem like a bad idea on the author's part. Not everyone's capable of inventing the future of language and that's fine, but maybe don't call attention to it if it's not your thing? The use of language kept on tripping me up, honestly.
- I have trouble believe all the worldbuilding history things. Like the genetically engineered corn that left much of the human population accidentally infertile because it's the kind of seed that's intended to not produce fertile offspring? I don't know huge amounts about genetic engineering or human biology but that seems, uh, scientifically implausible.
But everything else was good enough to absolutely be worth reading past these things.
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