Trending Thursday: Return From the Dead

Welcome to Trending Thursday, a new weekly feature!  I pick a trend of some sort and tell you about it and then we can discuss!

Nearly a year ago at BEA, a publicist from Harlequin put this book in my hands, telling me that Brad Pitt's production company had optioned it.

I took the ARC, but haven't read it because it wasn't YA and I thought it seemed kind of morbid -- it's about an older couple whose eight year old son died back in the 1960s. Decades later, he shows up on their doorstep -- alive, and still eight.

Resurrection, a TV show based on the book, premiered last month on ABC:

And since then, I've read two YA books with a similar "returned from the dead" premise and heard about a third:

Noggin

by John Corey Whaley

To be published on April 8, 2014

by Atheneum Books.

This book ... okay, the premise is pretty out-there and I'm kind of glad I didn't know that going in. So if you aren't always up for out-there books, stop reading NOW. Still here? Okay, the main character has cancer,  and when conventional treatments aren't working, his parents are told that the only hope is cryogenically freezing him. Well, not all of him. Just part of him. Then he's ... reanimated. Yes, this might sound a) creepy or c) just weird, but in an odd kind of way, this book is realistic fiction at its best -- a poignant, humorous, thought-provoking look at what happens to a boy after the world goes on without him and then he gets dropped back into it. Think Frankenstein meets Rip Van Winkle.  I really enjoyed it a lot.

Then I started reading this book, and I'll be darned if the premise isn't kind of similar:

The Taking

by Kimberly Derting

To be published by HarperTeen

on April 29, 2014

In this one, Kyra's on her way home from a softball game, bickering with her father about her college choices, when she vanishes into thin air. Then, five years later, she finds herself plopped back into her life with no explanation for her disappearance. Without spoilers, I'll just say that this one has more suspense and paranormal elements than Noggin. 

Then yesterday, I saw this on Addict Readers blog:

Sleeping Jenny

by Aubrie Dionne

Spencer Hill Press

As the daughter of multimillionaires, Jennifer has everything she's ever needed, except time. Diagnosed with a form of incurable cancer, she has only months to live, and her dreams of working for National Geographic to save African elephants and polar bears are shattered. Her only hope is an experimental cryogenic freezing program, which will keep her in stasis until doctors can find a cure. The cure comes three hundred years too late, and she wakes to a futuristic world where animals are all but forgotten.

Rip Van Winkle, Sleeping Beauty, dead-or-seemingly-dead people who suddenly reappear or reawaken.... 

Have you read other YA books that have similar themes? The only ones I could think of were two science fiction YA books that involve characters who are frozen or put into stasis:

A Long Long Sleep

by Anna Sheehan

(Candlewick 2011)

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.

Across the Universe

by Beth Revis

(Razorbill 2011)

Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awaken on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon and that she would be thrust into the brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules. Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone - one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship - tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn't do something soon, her parents will be next. Now Amy must race to unlock Godspeed's hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there's only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.

Any other books I should add to this mini-trend? And what do you think of it?