The Season of Light and Darkness by Jillian Cantor

In the months since a dictator was elected president, the United States has been turned upside down. Dissenters are deemed terrorists, including sixteen-year-old Ellie Jacobs’s family.

To escape persecution, the four of them—Ellie, her younger brother Scott, and their parents—decide to freeze themselves cryogenically for ten years in her father’s lab. In ten years, things will be better. They have to be.

But the government discovers the lab after only three years and thaws Ellie early. She awakens, completely alone, to a nightmare of a strange new world and is told the rest of her family didn’t survive. Suddenly, she must abandon everything she knows to go to through “ReAdmittance” and become “Initiated.” Ellie is terrified…until her boyfriend, Ryan, now a nineteen-year-old Initiated soldier, shows up and tells her everything will be fine, that she should trust the good people around her.

But Ellie isn’t sure if she can still trust Ryan.

What Ellie doesn’t know is that Scott never went through with the freeze. He ran away and has joined a band of teenage resistance fighters living in the mountains. No longer her “younger” brother, he’s now sixteen just like her. When Scott learns Ellie has been thawed early, he decides he must risk everything to save her before the brainwashing begins.

Together with other brave rebel teens, Ellie and Scott must navigate this terrible new world to find their way back to each other, before they lose everything—including who they are.

---

PRE-READING

There is something particularly unsettling about a dystopia that feels a little too plausible. In The Season of Light and Darkness, a newly elected US president declares war on science, scientists are forced to register themselves, and dissenters are treated as enemies of the state. It's the sort of premise that makes you wish the author had a more wildly imaginative view of the future.

There are shades of the eighties miniseries V here, too, with its authoritarian regime and the persecution of a group who represent something much bigger than themselves.

POST-READING

Ellie Jacobs and her family are trying to escape a government that considers them dangerous. Their solution is cryogenic freezing: wait ten years, wake up when things have improved, and start again. Unfortunately, the government discovers their laboratory after only three years, and Ellie is thawed alone into a world she barely recognises.

Her younger brother Scott, meanwhile, never went through with the freezing and has spent those years growing up in the resistance. When he learns Ellie is alive, he has to find a way to save her before the government can brainwash her into becoming one of its own.

There are several threads to follow here — Ellie, Scott and Ellie's boyfriend Ryan — but they come together nicely as the story progresses. The freezing mechanism is a particularly clever way of introducing Ellie to this unfamiliar world. She has no idea what has happened during her missing years, and neither does the reader, so we discover the new rules alongside her.

The political imagery is not exactly subtle. Scientists are persecuted as a proxy for Jewish people, while the president's demands that all women have platinum-blonde hair, regardless of their natural colouring, add another layer of enforced conformity. The regime's methods and imagery deliberately evoke Nazism, making this a story about much more than a futuristic technological nightmare.

As I expected

The atmosphere is one of the strongest elements of the book. Sterile corridors, whispered conversations that must not be overheard, and young people determined to fight back all contribute to a world where even the smallest act of independence can be dangerous.

The resistance threads also give the story some welcome variety. Ellie is trying to work out whom she can trust, while Scott has been fighting against the system for years. They are siblings, but they have effectively grown up in different worlds.

I was surprised by

How neatly the different storylines come together by the end. With several characters and perspectives to follow, there's a risk of the story feeling fragmented, but their journeys converge in a satisfying way.

That said, this is clearly the beginning of a larger story. Several questions remain unresolved, and there is plenty of room for another volume. Happily, it doesn't end on a complete cliffhanger, although I would certainly like to know what happens next.

RECOMMENDATIONS

For another YA dystopia about young people resisting an oppressive system, try The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. And for the television comparison that kept coming to mind while reading, seek out the original V miniseries, with its sinister authoritarian visitors and the resistance trying to expose them.

MUSIC PAIRING

“The Resistance” — Muse

A fitting soundtrack for young people discovering that the world they've been told to trust is built on lies, and deciding to fight back anyway.

VIBE CHECK

Colour palette: Clinical white, cold silver, shadowy grey and the artificial platinum blonde demanded by the regime.

Soundtrack: Fluorescent lights humming in sterile corridors, whispered conversations, distant footsteps and the sudden noise of a door opening when it really shouldn't.

Season: Winter, with the promise of spring somewhere beyond the walls.

Mood: Paranoid, claustrophobic, defiant and quietly hopeful.

Scent: Disinfectant, cold metal and the stale air of rooms where nobody feels safe enough to speak freely.

Texture: Smooth laboratory surfaces, stiff uniforms, cold glass and the rough fabric of clothes worn by people who have been living outside the system.

TAROT CARD PULLED

The Moon

The Moon is about uncertainty, hidden truths and the difficulty of knowing whom to trust. It is particularly appropriate for Ellie, who wakes into a world where the information she receives may be deliberately misleading, the people around her may not be what they seem, and she must find her own way through the darkness.

It's also a card for the frightening space between what we believe and what we can prove. In Ellie's world, that space is exactly where the government wants to keep her.

✦ THE TRUE QUESTION ✦

When the world insists that a lie is the truth, how do you hold on to what you know?

Ellie and Scott must both work out which voices deserve their trust, while a government determined to control people's thoughts and identities tries to make independent thinking impossible. Their resistance begins with refusing to surrender their own understanding of the world.

The Season of Light and Darkness published on 4 August 2026. I received a free copy and am giving an honest review.