The opening of Martin’s latest book will feel very familiar to most readers. Leanne Khoury, the teenage protagonist, lives in a world torn apart by a pandemic, but this one explicitly worse than the coronavirus. This fictional pandemic, called the Century Virus, affects primarily teenagers and young adults, with a fifty percent mortality rate.
Leanne has recently been infected.
Fortunately for her, her parents can afford to have her cryogenically frozen until an effective treatment can be developed. She wakes years afterward, into a world which feels both familiar and foreign. Some societal trends have faded away, others have blossomed, and one troubling one has grown worse than ever. Leanne lives in Canada, and the political instability in the United States has grown bad enough that there are frequent rumblings of fear that Canada will be invaded.
Martin has crafted a near-future story that manages to tread the difficult line between keeping an intimate focus on one character and showing the changes that have occurred in the wider world. The novel feels at once like a fantastical coming of age for one girl and a glimpse at a world which might be in the years to come. I was intrigued by the world-building, even those parts the readers only receive glimpses of.
That was the one weakness of having the novel focused solely on Leanne’s perspective. So many details are left to the readers’ imaginations. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; I enjoyed connecting the dots and imagining what might have happened in those intervening years. At other points, I found some of the details strange and unexpected, or at least wished I knew a little more about what had happened and what else had changed.
But in the end, this is not the story of the world, or even the story of Canadian or North American culture. It is the story of one girl, transplanted from one time to another, trying to find a new way to live. In that, it is delightful. The only reason I took off a star was that at times the prose was difficult to follow.
This book will perfectly suit people looking for a new sci-fi YA novel to read. Leanne is not a Katniss, shifting the world around her, but not every protagonist has to be. Sometimes, this book says, it is enough to have your world be yourself and the people around you. Even when a wider world reaches out to you, that may be all you have to save.
