The Season of Light and Darkness

By: Jillian Cantor

A girl is woken early from her cryogenic slumber to find the authoritarian rule her family had hoped to escape is still very much in effect in this unforgettable young adult dystopian thriller perfect for fans of Divergent and The Handmaid’s Tale.

In the months since a dictator was elected president, the United States has been turned upside down. Dissenters are deemed terrorists, including sixteen-year old Ellie Jacobs’s family.

To escape persecution, the four of them—Ellie, her younger brother Scott, and their parents—decide to freeze themselves cryogenically for ten years in her father’s lab. In ten years, things will be better. They have to be.

But the government discovers the lab after only three years and thaws Ellie early. She awakens, completely alone, to a nightmare of a strange new world and is told the rest of her family didn’t survive. Suddenly, she must abandon everything she knows to go to through “ReAdmittance” and become “Initiated.” Ellie is terrified…until her boyfriend, Ryan, now a nineteen-year-old Initiated soldier, shows up and tells her everything will be fine, that she should trust the good people around her.

But Ellie isn’t sure if she can still trust Ryan.

What Ellie doesn’t know is that Scott never went through with the freeze. He ran away and has joined a band of teenage resistance fighters living in the mountains. No longer her “younger” brother, he’s now sixteen just like her. When Scott learns Ellie has been thawed early, he decides he must risk everything to save her before the brainwashing begins.

Together with other brave rebel teens, Ellie and Scott must navigate this terrible new world to find their way back to each other, before they lose everything—including who they are.