Rosalinda Fitzroy has been asleep for sixty-two years when she is woken by a kiss. Locked away in the chemically induced slumber of a stasis tube in a forgotten subbasement, sixteen-year-old Rose slept straight through the Dark Times that killed millions and utterly changed the world she knew. 

Now, her parents and her first love are long gone, and Rose-- hailed upon her awakening as the long-lost heir to an interplanetary empire-- is thrust alone into a future in which she is viewed as either a freak or a threat. Desperate to put the past behind her and adapt to her new world, Rose finds herself drawn to the boy who kissed her awake, hoping that he can help her to start fresh. But when a deadly danger jeopardizes her fragile new existence, Rose must face the ghosts of her past with open eyes-- or be left without any future at all.

Oh, oh this book.  Tez (of Tez Says) really enjoyed this book and I was inclined to read it because its a scifi twist on Sleeping Beauty (plus at least one other fairy tale I can't put my finger on), but this book was WONDERFUL.  It was perfect; perhaps not technically perfect, but it was perfect for the time I was reading it.  There's a scene, near the end, when Rose is confronted with a lot of harsh truths really quickly and I had tears pouring down my face.  This reminded me of The Adoration of Jenna Fox (by Mary J. Pearson) actually as both dealt with gaps in memory and struggling with identity.

From an outsider perspective, Rose's memories don't match up quite right from the get go.  Not just the fact she knew her boyfriend Xavier from he was in diapers, aging next to him in fits and spurts until they were the same age finally.  Someone mentions she should be in her late 70's, based on the birthdate they found and she muses silently that she's really more like a hundred years old given all the times she's been "stassed" (put into stasis) throughout her childhood.

Her casual acceptance of this goes from worrisome to outright disturbing when a character--the boy who found her, Bren, says she uses being stassed like a drug to escape.  Little things throughout the novel start to make more horrifying sense.

And then there's the ultimate revelations close to the end that just...this poor girl.  The twist with the person hunting her was surprising, but fits in so well with everything we found out that its almost sickening too.

I found her friendship with Otto, a teen boy part of a hybrid/genetic experiment done by her parents' company while she was stassed,  to be fascinating.  Unable to 'talk' with each other, their conversations by instant messenger are far more revealing then any other discussion. The anonymity of the screen helps them both I think.

This isn't a fast paced book; Rose slips in and out of her memories often, and her memories aren't told sequentially for the most part.  She's also rather...vague as a personality at first.  Partially because when her parents were alive she didn't have one really.  They told her where to go, what to wear, how to talk.  The only time she really acted on her own was when she was with Xavier, but even then she was so afraid of her parents taking it away she didn't really act on her own.

A unique retelling of the sleeping beauty fairy tale, this princess overcomes her demons and figures out how to save herself.