A review by misssusan
When We Wake by Karen Healey

4.0

man this is the kind of book i want to teach in english classes

like it tackles all these sort of current events type themes that my profs tend to use as a gauge of a book's quality but also manages to be really absorbing and just fun to read

it is basically political activism: the thesis

so like. excellent jumping ground for discussion!

also tegan's a great narrator, she is basically an action movie heroine with a social conscience

plus she has great friends, like me and bethari should hang. she can teach me all about future tech and i can enviously contemplate a twenty second century where anti-muslim prejudice is a thing of the past

(idk if i bought it exactly because i find it difficult to believe that anti-immigrant sentiment could get decoupled from racism and islamophobia; there's a lot of muslims in those third world countries people hate so much in this book. still a nice fantasy though)

plus outside that particular note i found healey's depiction of the future super plausible, good in some aspects, terrible in others, all in ways that feel like they could easily emerge from our current discourse

4 stars