Waiting on Wednesday #10

HOSTED BY BREAKING THE SPINE

Echo by Alicia Wright Brewster

Expected publication: February 2013 by Dragonfairy Press

The countdown clock reads less than thirteen days until the end of the world.

The citizens are organized. Everyone's been notified and assigned a duty. The problem is . . . while the end of the world has been foreseen, no one knows for sure how it will end.

Energy-hungry mages are the most likely culprit. They travel toward a single location from every corner of the continent. Fueled by the two suns, each mage holds the power of the elements: air, earth, fire, metal, water, and ether. They harness the elements to draw energy from the most readily available resource. Humans.

Ashara has been assigned to the Ethereal task group, made up of human ether manipulators and directed by Loken, a young man with whom she has a complicated past. Loken and Ashara bond over a common goal: to stop the mages from occupying their home and gaining more energy than they can contain. But soon, they begin to suspect that the future of the world may depend on Ashara's death.

When We Wake by Karen Healey

Expected publication: March 5th 2013 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

My name is Tegan Oglietti, and on the last day of my first lifetime, I was so, so happy.

Sixteen-year-old Tegan is just like every other girl living in 2027 - she's happiest when playing the guitar, she's falling in love for the first time, and she's joining her friends to protest the wrongs of the world: environmental collapse, social discrimination, and political injustice.

But on what should have been the best day of Tegan's life, she dies - and wakes up a hundred years in the future, locked in a government facility with no idea what happened.

Tegan is the first government guinea pig to be cryonically frozen and successfully revived, which makes her an instant celebrity - even though all she wants to do is try to rebuild some semblance of a normal life. But the future isn't all she hoped it would be, and when appalling secrets come to light, Tegan must make a choice: Does she keep her head down and survive, or fight for a better future?

Award-winning author Karen Healey has created a haunting, cautionary tale of an inspiring protagonist living in a not-so-distant future that could easily be our own.