Review: Altered by Jennifer Rush

Author: Jennifer Rush
Publisher: Little Brown Books for Young Readers
Date of publication: January 2013

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. 

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 was a random audio pick from my library.  I hadn't heard of the series but it sounded interesting.  I actually was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this book.  While there is a bit of teen infatuation, it isn't an insta-love situation and there is no love triangle. Yippee!  The characters were well written and just mysterious enough that I wanted to know more about them.  There were a couple of surprises in the book that made it that much better.

Anna has become friends with four boys who live in an underground lab on her father's farm.  She has fallen for Sam, the leader, pretty hard.  When they plan an escape, her father pushes her to go with the boys.  She has no understanding of why, only that she senses she would be in danger if she didn't.  She embarks on a journey to help the boys find out who they are.  It seems that Sam left himself clues should he ever want to find out about his past.  I liked this aspect of the book.  The clues were cleverly hidden and I had fun following them along with the characters. While the ending didn't really end on a cliffhanger, it did leave a lot of questions unanswered.  I'm hoping they are addressed in the next book, Erased, which comes out sometime next year. 

My only complaint about the book was the narrator of the audiobook.  I didn't think she did a great job of narrating.  She paused after every sentence and some of the character voices blended together so that conversations were hard to follow at times.  If the next book is narrated by the same reader, I will probably read the print book as opposed to listening to the audio.