Awaken by Katie Kacvinsky

Website: http://www.katiekacvinsky.com/

Hardcover, 352 pages (I was provided with the digital edition from the publisher.)

Expected Publication: 05/23/2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

ISBN: 9780547371481

Summary:

Maddie lives in a world where everything is done on the computer. Whether it’s to go to school or on a date, people don’t venture out of their home. There’s really no need. For the most part, Maddie’s okay with the solitary, digital life—until she meets Justin.

Justin likes being with people. He enjoys the physical closeness of face-to-face interactions. People aren’t meant to be alone, he tells her.

Suddenly, Maddie feels something awakening inside her—a feeling that maybe there is a different, better way to live. But with society and her parents telling her otherwise, Maddie is going to have to learn to stand up for herself if she wants to change the path her life is taking.

In this not-so-brave new world, two young people struggle to carve out their own space.

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Review:

The first thing that attracted me to Awaken was the cover—as it is for me with most books. The more I stare at this cover, the more I understand what it represents. You can’t jar nature; you can’t put plants or animals in a box and expect them to live. Really, that’s not living at all, now is it? But that’s exactly what’s happening in Awaken. Maddie, the lead character, is used to being inside, going to school via the internet, holing away and being someone she’s not online. She’s an avatar. A picture. Anything she wants to be—and everything she’s not. She yearns for something different and attempts to achieve it when she betrays her family at a young age. Now she’s restricted and left to live in her technological world, play her technological games, and communicate through—you guessed it—technology. Awaken, to me, represents what our world will become when people start to fear leaving their houses and decide to stay indoors. In this remarkable novel we might actually see our own lives jump off the pages. Is this what we’re becoming? To not truly know what it is to feel someone else, to let someone hold you, or for you to hold another? It’s almost scary.

Let me explain Awaken to you quickly, because I’m pretty sure all of my blog readers will be interested in this. Since I’m a full time author, I find the majority of my time glued to the computer for one reason or the other. This book actually made me feel incredibly guilty that I’m not living my life outside of it. It’s not completely true, but as Justin, the male lead character who convinces Maddie it’s okay to go outside her house and see other people, talk to them face to face, touch them, be with them, I feel that I too must spend more time in “reality.” Maddie’s father is a powerful man. Famous, beloved, the creator of Digital School. So imagine how he feels when he finds that his daughter is seeking a connection outside of his carefully constructed online world? He eventually becomes fed up with his daughter who’s spending too much time with “that boy Justin” who teaches her the opposite of how he lives his whole life. So, as any clueless father, he sends her away. Fortunately, Justin intercepts her and now Maddie must go “off the grid.” No technology. No email. No phone. No traveling. But then she soon learns that she didn’t need any of that now that she’s been awakened. Or maybe it’s just Justin’s soft lips?

Oh yes. On top of an intense storyline, we have a romance to remember. Justin and Maddie’s relationship is slow going—only because they are both so caught up in their own world they miss the point of what Justin—and soon Maddie’s—preaching is all about: connecting. But when both of them (mainly Justin) finally gives in, I swear I swooned, almost falling off the couch and gripping my Nook like it was really Justin. It was freakin’ . . . fantastical. Magical. Stunning. Brilliant. I saw stars, fireworks, rainbows exploding from my Nook. I don’t know how Katie did it, but she had me. Almost as if she super-glued my eyeballs to the screen.

Katie is a very talented and gifted author. Her way with words, thoughts, and dialog all make this book much more than a twisted tale of what the future might hold. She’s spun this world as if weaving a golden plot—intricately, and masterfully, crafting this story with such dazzling radiance I thought sparks would shoot from my body when I got excited! Awaken is shiny in its simplistic nature—though each word seems to be deliberately placed, like setting up your chess pieces before you call out “check mate.” Her characters, Maddie and Justin, pop off the pages. Or maybe it was I who had been sucked into the book? Either way, I couldn’t stop reading once I started. I devoured this book and was actually disappointed to find out the release date is in May and it’s only December. Now I’ll only have to wait that much longer to find out what happens next.