Vermilion Sunrise, by Lydia P. Brownlow

It was a nice change for me to read an engrossing YA sci fi story that checked lots of my reading boxes--Vermilion Sunrise, by Lydia P. Brownlow (May 2, 2023 by Warren Publishing).  

17-year-old Leigh has no memory of volunteering to be one of the first colonists on a watery world far from Earth, and so it is more than a bit of a shock when she wakes from cyrosleep and is shuttled down to the planet with very little in the way of a briefing.  The cyrosleep technology is flawed--killing adults.  So her new home is inhabited only by teenagers.  Hers is the third shuttle of kids arriving at a small island outpost.  The earlier arrivals, from countries all around the world, have no answers for Leigh's many questions--why does none of the technology that came with these first settlers work?  Why were these kids selected to be colonists, and why do none of them remember volunteering?  Why have none of them been told what to do? And she has her own demons to struggle with, hoping to put her traumatic past behind her and start again, with a new name and identity.

I was worried that it might become a Lord of the Flies scenario, but happily for my reading pleasure, the kids that were already there included some great leaders, who had made their settlement into a functional sort of found family.  And much of the book involves the dynamics of this group as they work together to make their outpost a place to call home.  Another mystery quickly intrudes, though--bits of a broken shuttle are washing ashore.  Could there be survivors beyond this one island?

A perilous voyage through stormy seas is the only way to find answers...but will the answers they find destroy the tenuous peace of their home?

So the pacing won't be for everyone--for much of the book, there are few Exciting Happenings (there are some very exciting ones towards the end though).  You have to be a real lover of character driven survival stories to fully appreciate this one, which I am, so I did! I really enjoyed the group dynamics as they worked through practical and ethical problems together, and the romance was sweet.  The only thing that would have made me like the book more would have been more time spent by the kids trying to figure out the ecology of the world.  One of the things I immediately found disturbing about this already disturbing situation (and the wrongness of it all is clear from the get-go) was that the colonist kids didn't include anyone with biology experience, and so there wasn't much attention paid to the specifics of flora and fauna (and fauna, especially, was given short shrift).  

I will happily read more about these kids and their new world!  The book ends at a good stopping point, but I want more answers (why, as Leigh herself asks, are there no Canadians? Has something bad happened to Canada? And even more pressingly, why the heck weren't the kids briefed and trained?) and more attention paid to the ecology (the ready-made "food" supplies they arrived with won't last forever....).

disclaimer: review copy received from the author.