Cold Awakening Series by Robin Wasserman (Gina)

This year I attended my first teen author's festival in NYC. The whole reason I was going was to see one of my favorite authors in the genre speak in one of the forums. The forum was about writing emotional darkness into your novels and how it is conveyed and seen in different ways. Of course the author I wanted to see was there but also several others that I wasn't familiar with, one of which was Robin Wasserman.

Before the forum started, each author read from one of their novels and Wasserman read from her latest from the Cold Awakening Series. Normally I steer clear of sci-fi novels. It isn't my taste but the reading Wasserman did was enough to get me curious. So I went home and bought the trilogy off Amazon (yay Amazon Prime) and got reading.

The books are about a teenage girl of the future named Lia Kahn who was very much the golden child in her family. That is until she is in a horrible car accident which destroys her body and ultimately kills her. However, in the future your brain can be scanned and downloaded into a new body. Lia then becomes a "skinner," a freak of human nature and everyone who used to know Lia sees her differently. The download has changed her life forever. The trilogy goes through Lia's life changes and shows us a world where "skinners" and humans exist. I like to think that this is the book Feed by M.T. Anderson on steroids. 

The plot of all three books was always good but the common trend was that it took me about halfway through them to finally feel connected to them. Lia was a hard character to like or feel anything for while the supporting characters seemed more human than robot. I think Wasserman wanted us to see growth in Lia so taking Lia through emotional extremes seemed necessary. However, I think they took Lia farther away from the reader.  The second book was the strongest or at least that's what I think. There was a lot more emotion in that one and I felt like for the first time we were really getting to see who Lia was as a person. There was something deeper.

There was plenty of drama, some romance, and lots of puzzles which I am a huge fan of in my fiction. Yet sadly the characters in this trilogy seemed a little..."eh."

Also, the ending of the trilogy seemed like it was rushed. I hate when authors do this because I feel like either they were just tired of writing the book and wanted it to be over so they could start something else or because they didn't know how to end it so they just wrote something. The ending left me feeling a little numb. I know that she was trying to get us to see a bigger picture and to understand human nature and everything in the end but I don't know. It fell flat for me. You'll see what I mean.

I am give this trilogy a 3.5/5.