A Long, Long Sleep by Anna Sheehan

Yes! A future fantasy/romance/dystopia that that tells a creative story and keeps the pace moving!

If you’ve read other reviews of fantasy fiction here, you know that I am hard to please when it comes to the pace of the book—so many seem to bog down in frivolous detail. But A Long, Long Sleep will keep you awake and engaged. There’ s lots of action, there’s unrequited love, and, yes, there’s an opportunity for the protagonist to come to terms with her past.

And Rosalinda Fitzroy’s past is along one. She’s about a hundred years old. But she is biologically sixteen. That’s because she has spent most of her life in a stasis tube—suspended in a dream world from which she generates her artistic ideas.

As a child, Rosalinda’s parents—probably the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet—would put her into a chemically-induced sleep each time they needed to take an interplanetary trip or just needed a break from childrearing. But in her last stint in the stasis tube, no one remembered to wake Rose up. She stayed asleep for sixty-two years, missing the Dark Times (and a plague) that destroyed half the earth’s population. When she is awakened—it appears that her prince charming has come to kiss her, though he’s actually shocked to find her and is trying to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation—her parents are long dead and the love of her life has also disappeared.

Rose tries to remake her life as an ordinary high school girl. But the facts of her life make her a bit creepy to most of the other students. Her love interest (and the prince charming who woke her), Bren, seems to be nice only because he’s nice to everyone, and his parents want him to look out for Rose. She best connects with a blue-skinned half-alien boy, Otto, who has also been used experimentally. In addition, Rose is the heir to her parents’ galaxy-spanning company, but she hasn’t the least idea of how to run a business. Nothing goes very well, and Rose uses her painting as an outlet.

Though this future isn’t entirely dystopian—the world is a better place after the plague; there is financial stability and people have plenty—technology has created a life-threatening problem for Rose in the form of a Plastine. This Plastine is something of a robot that is programmed either to return Rose to the target, or, if unable to find the target, kill her. And this guy is unstoppably strong. So Rose must figure out why the Plastine is out to get her. And as she grows stronger, she wonders: what could have kept her parents from waking her up?

Like Cinder, A Long, Long Sleep just begins with a fairytale premise (here, it’s obviously Sleeping Beauty) and jets off into the future with a dash of science fiction. It’s a lot of fun to hitch a ride. This novel is appropriate for all teens.