THE SEASON OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS, by Jillian Cantor, Simon Pulse, Aug. 4, 2026, Hardcover, $21.99 (young adult, ages 14 and up)
A girl is woken early from cryogenic sleep to find the dictator her family had hoped to escape is still in charge in 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. —Synopsis provided by Simon Pulse
The Season of Light and Darkness is a dystopian novel that feels eerily plausible.
We do live in a world where people are denying science, where women’s rights are being taken away, where the few are dictating what life should look like for the many. Author Jillian Cantor builds on these themes, setting the tone for a book that is as compelling as it is disconcerting.
The story unfolds from the alternating third-person viewpoints of Ellie, Scott, Olivia and Mateo; though Olivia and Mateo don’t take on larger roles until later in the book. This approach provides readers with a greater understanding of the world at large and narrows the focus on particular storylines.
The Season of Light and Darkness is not a standalone novel, which is super frustrating because it ended with a cliffhanger that readers are going to want resolved sooner rather than later. It’s a fast-moving and thought-provoking read
Copyright © 2026 Cracking the Cover. Unless otherwise noted, all books — digital and physical — have been provided by publishers in exchange for honest and unbiased reviews. All thoughts and opinions are those of the reviewer.
