Alive

by Scott Sigler
345 pgs  (The Generations trilogy #1)

I've mentioned this before, but one of the things I really enjoy about science fiction books is that oftentimes you have to read your way through an orientation period. You start out with no idea of what's going on. The setting of the story could be anywhere in the universe; the story could be taking place at any point in time; the characters could be human, alien, or even synthetic. I look forward to and enjoy the time it takes to get my bearings each time, and more often than not, the story that follows is unique, imaginative, and very enjoyable. Scott Sigler's first book in his new trilogy Alive is a great example of what I'm talking about.

The book begins with a teenage girl waking up in a coffin. She doesn't know where she is, how she got there, nor does she even know who she is. Her limbs are restrained and she has to figure out how to free herself and escape from the coffin. When she does, she finds herself in a room that contains several other coffins just like the one she just crawled out of. As she opens the other coffins, she discovers other teenagers all waking up and like herself, having no recollection of who they are and how they came to be there. They're all wearing clothes that it look like they grew out of them years ago and they all have varying marks on their foreheads.

She learns from the label on her coffin that her name is M. Savage and decides she'll go by Em until she can remember her true first name. Em's elected the leader of their small group and they begin a journey of discovery and survival as they all try to find answers to all of their questions.

Alive is a promising start to a trilogy that hopefully will stand on its own in a genre that has become increasingly overcrowded over the past few years. I doubt it will achieve the popularity obtained by either The Hunger Games and Divergent series, but I don't think that's because it's not as good, I just think it's because times have changed and the interest in 'young-adult-dystopian-science fiction' books has faded.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆