Quarterfinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award 2014 contest
(June 2026)
Sarina, Sweetheart
Formats: E-Book, Paperback
Her name is Sarina Wocek. Her breath is poison. She was not born out of love.
Twenty-three years ago, government officials traced the budding epidemic of hemorrhagic fever HF186-2A in south Florida to the Wocek family and their adorable six-week-old daughter, Sarina. Her father, Gregory, admitted his role in genetically engineering a biological weapon with pride. She was taken to a lab hidden in a rural area of New Hampshire. She hasn't left since.
Her government keepers could cure her, but they won't. Genetically engineering a child to be a weapon of mass destruction, that's unethical. Refining a weapon of mass destruction that someone else created? That's just being clever.
After twenty-three years of captivity, she escapes. She crosses an ocean to put her father and the lab behind her, but it's not enough. When she sees the first bleeding sore, she knows she didn't leave the virus behind either.
The only way she'll be free is by destroying every trace of the lab. She only has one advantage; she doesn't care if she makes it out alive.
Reviews
"This excerpt is meticulously crafted and detail oriented. The author seems in absolute control of the storyline and captures Sarina's voice in a chilling and authentic manner. The plotting is clever and we are immediately engrossed in Sarina's terrifying world as a lab rat. The doctors and nurse in the laboratory are given just enough detail to feel individualized and differentiated from one another. There is conflict here in spades and the feeling of a building thriller." "The strongest aspect of this excerpt is its prose style, which gives Sarina a distinctive and compelling voice without sacrificing readability or narrative pace. The language flows easily, and the exposition is well-balanced to draw the reader into the story without losing the spontaneous, natural quality of Sarina's monologue. There's nothing superficially flashy about the style, but its clipped rhythms give a sense of Sarina's personality: the drive, the quiet arrogance, the mordant sense of humor. Her drive and her sense of humor also keep the excerpt respectively fast-paced and bleakly funny for readers: lines like “I'm not sure which part of my life she's jealous of: the part where I am forced to be a lab animal, or the part where the lab hides their true plans for me” inject the narrative with a dark humor that complements its fast pace and high stakes. It's rare to encounter an unpublished novel with such command of the nuances of first-person narration." Publisher's Weekly, ABNA 2014 reviews
