Altered (Review)

Altered: Altered | Jennifer Rush
YA, Science Fiction, Thriller

Characters ★★★★★

Setting ★★★★☆

Writing Style ★★★★★

When you can’t trust yourself, who can you believe?

Everything about Anna’s life is a secret. Her father works for the Branch at the helm of its latest project: monitoring and administering treatments to the four genetically altered boys in the lab below their farmhouse. There’s Nick, Cas, Trev . . . and Sam, who’s stolen Anna’s heart. When the Branch decides it’s time to take the boys, Sam stages an escape, killing the agents sent to retrieve them. 

Anna is torn between following Sam or staying behind in the safety of her everyday life. But her father pushes her to flee, making Sam promise to keep her away from the Branch, at all costs. There’s just one problem. Sam and the boys don’t remember anything before living in the lab—not even their true identities.

Now on the run, Anna soon discovers that she and Sam are connected in more ways than either of them expected. And if they’re both going to survive, they must piece together the clues of their past before the Branch catches up to them and steals it all away.

REVIEW

Altered blew me away. It had the same high stakes, fast paced feel to it as All Our Yesterdays and Reboot, but it had something else entirely. Reading it, I felt highly strung and on edge - Jennifer Rush just dragged me head first into the story and immersed me with terror, excitement, and the desperate desperate need to protect every one of the boys (especially Nick. Oh, how I love Nick.)

I loved Anna's isolation, how all she knew was the boys, and her whole life, her career, her everything revolved around them because she had nothing else. But what I loved most of all was her development, how she grew as a character from someone following her father's rules to breaking the Branch's to save her boys. I really think she found her own mind.

The plot was action packed, terrifying, thrilling and there was both too much and not enough of it. I need more of their story or I'm going to combust. I need to know that Sam and Anna are happy and together, that Cas isn't very badly injured and can recover, that Nick has someone who understands him and is patient with the walls he's built around himself, that Trev will redeem himself. But most of all I need to know about Anna, about her past, about the Branch and what they're keeping secret and what motivated Anna's 'father' to keep her in the dark.

I need to know everything! I devoured this book and it consumed me in return. God, I need book two right now.

★★★★★