This is a story trope that I feel has been done to death in adult science fiction: the colony generation ship is taken over by cult-ish extremists while the colonists cryosleep and the heroine awakens to make things right.
But, that being said, I haven't read it in middle grade, not once, so that's definitely new and different, and I loved the Hispanic / Latinx cultural references throughout.
Petra Peña flees with her family to one of the last colony ships preparing to leave Earth before an asteroid of mega proportions wipes out the Earth. If you're not on a ship, there's no chance of survival.
She doesn't really realize what's happening before she and her whole family – mom, dad, and little brother -- are put into cryosleep to spend the hundreds of years needed to reach a Goldilocks planet, one the survivors are planning to colonize.
Certain members have been chosen to stay awake on the ship and monitor the sleepers, and in the intervening centuries, there's a coup by cult-ish extremists who want to purge any hint of Earth's failings and flawed thinking from the collective memory, in favor of a new, "right" way of doing things that of course doesn't involve any independent thought whatsoever.
Petra fights to hold onto the stories her parents and abuela told her, that she read when she was a girl, that her caretaker fed to her cryo-dreams before he was cruelly killed and her memory "wiped." When she awakens, she finds her mom and dad are dead, her little brother is no where to be found, and she must suppress her knowledge of the cuentos, or stories, of the "before."
Which of course, she can't do. More importantly, the other kids, just now being awoken to help terraform and colonize the new planet, want her stories, too.
It's a testament to the power of stories and to how much they are woven into the fabric of our beings. Enjoy!
