The plot: A teenage girl named Amy joins her parents as part of a cryogenics experiment on a cargo ship bound for a new planet. She awakens expecting to be on a new planet three hundred years from when she was placed in stasis. What she doesn't expect is that she has been awoken too soon and that in the two hundred-fifty years she has been asleep, the ships inhabitants have become very different than the people she knew in her time. She meets - and is immediately fascinated by - Elder, who was bred to be the future leader of the ship and what unfolds is an adventure and a love she could never have imagined.
The Verdict: Excellent. Obviously. I ingested these books (some 900 pages) back-to-back in one weekend. They are absolutely fantastic. The plot has a million twists and turns, the suspense is high throughout the entire book and Amy is a wonderfully accessible, normal teenage girl who takes on extraordinary circumstances. I particularly love this series (as it is told from her POV) because she is not the typical, weak-willed teen girl archetype. Yes, there's a romance element to this series, but it is about far, far more than that - and Amy struggles constantly with being her own woman in a world completely alien to her.
Sci-Fi setting, mystery/suspense, romance AND a strong female POV voice. This series has it all. As I said, I absolutely cannot wait for the third and I recommend these books to teens and adults alike.
