By: Jennifer Rush
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Release Date: January 1, 2013
Genre/Age: YA Sci-Fi
Pages: 336
Source: ARC from Around the World ARC Tours
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.
Altered is
a wonderfully unique adventure that barely slows down from start to finish. It
took a little while for me to really get into it, partly because it is so
different, but once things got going I couldn’t help but get invested in Anna
and her relationship with the four boys. It was a really fun dynamic to have
one girl with four guys, and I really loved that Anna could hold her own with
them. No damsels in distress to be found here!
There were several things that I predicted right
from the beginning, which caused a lot of frustrated yelling at the characters
for not realizing things sooner, but I actually enjoy getting that emotional
about a book. And there were a few twists that I absolutely didn’t see coming,
which was fantastic.
Altered doesn’t
end on a cliffhanger, but things are left open enough for the possibility of a
sequel, and I would love to find out more about the Branch and their
experiments. If you’re looking for a fresh sci-fi story that will pull you, and
especially if you’re a fan of the TV show Nikita,
I would definitely recommend Altered.
