Waking Up Adaline is the existential crisis of a high-functioning woman

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About

If I told you Adaline was taking meth two times a day, you'd say she's a drug addict. She's not. She's Adaline. A high-functioning, Adderall-popping Vice President wasting her life. Again.

After a drunken night and a driverless car leave her sprawled on the Austin asphalt, her soul slips somewhere between life and death.

It’s the indifference she encounters that sends her looking for answers.

If they exist, they wait on a past-life regressionist's table. There, Adaline meets the King. The Orphan. And Candy from Pickens, West Virginia. Three lives she has lived before, and three people who think they know why she keeps saying yes to the life she knows she doesn't want.

Adaline must decide whether the money, control, and safety she's spent lifetimes building are worth giving up for a timeline she’s never let herself choose.

One where she’s finally happy.

For readers of Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow and Brian L. Weiss’s Many Lives, Many Masters.

A forest with tall trees and a dirt path running through it, sunlight filtering through the leaves.

Core Themes

The book was written to get ahead of core themes that humanity will be wrestling with.

  • IRL Data Sharing

  • Job loss due to AI

  • Lack of individual purpose

  • Removal of external identity

  • Neither pro nor against AI

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Two women are engaged in a serious conversation, facing each other indoors near a bed, with a plain wall in the background.
A young woman with long brown hair driving a car at night, showing a tense or angry expression.