Bitterroot Awakening
Lisa Pederson
Paperback
(Independently published, June 15, 2019)
Beyond your wildest nightmares is the village of Bitterroot. Encased in a plastic pod, sixteen-year-old Salix Saguaro awakens from her eleven-month slumber deep beneath the desert floor, and she only has one month before the next slumber begins. Post-World War III, Salix and her family are residents in the barren village of Bitterroot – a post-apocalyptic desert of desolation and grief in what used to be the United States. 99% of the world’s population and most of the natural resources have been decimated, and the government has had to take drastic measures to ensure the survival of the human race. They have taken some of the most beautiful things in life – learning, relationships, and even childbearing – and boiled it down to chemicals and equations. Salix has spent most of her life in an engineered dream world, which in reality is a forced hibernation sugarcoated by the government as The Great Slumber. Salix is now seeing the village with older, wiser eyes, and the precious little time outside of the slumber, she unearths some of the government’s greatest secrets – a conspiracy they would kill to protect. The clock is ticking, and Salix only has thirty days before the next slumber to make the biggest decision of her life: abandon her family in search of help that may not even exist or endure a nightmare of human experimentation at the hands of the government. Can one small voice, a girl living on the absolute margins of a dystopian society, have the power to save humanity?