Timothy Miller (5)

AWOKEN was a fast-paced fantasy novel with lots of action. Michael is an orphan who has moved from foster home to foster home. He is is guarded and tends to react first with anger. He also hears music from rocks and always has. He is settling in at his new home when, one night, he notices a strange cat seemingly watching him and some little albino men coming out from under the porch to fight with the cat. He is freaked out but even more freaked out when one of the little men comes to his show more room and convinces him to drink from a strange stone cup and accept a strange necklace. It changes his relationship with stone and dumps him in the middle of a war between the People and the Ven.

After being warned to avoid the brown and the green, Michael goes to park and winds up running into some human bullies. He is rescued by Lina who is a poor-little-rich girl but just as tough, guarded and angry as Michael is. In the fight, he loses the necklace and Lina finds it. She rinses off the clay coating to find a jewel in a metal setting which bonds itself to her hand and begins changing her DNA.

Michael goes to his friend Diggs who is a drifter living by the river. Diggs knows what Michael is facing and together they are determined to get to the People who might be able to get the jewel off Lina and stop her mutation into something else. They also take one of the People with them that Michael names Jericho. The four of them have to defeat the evil scientist who wants to change the world and his hybrid mutants.

Middle graders will enjoy this story. While I didn't like either Michael or Lina very much at the beginning because of their anger, I grew to like them and feel for the difficult decisions that both of them had to make. Short chapters would make it a candidate as a classroom read-aloud. show less