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Altered By: Jennifer Rush
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.
You know that saying, "don't judge a book by it's cover"? Yeah, I completely ignored that when I picked up this book. The cover looked so cool I put it on my to-read list before I knew what it was about. I'm totally glad I did, too. Anna was an extremely likable main character. She was easy to relate to, even though her life isn't anything like mine. Her life probably isn't very similar to yours, either, unless you grew up working for the government and taking care of four genetically modified guys. Anna just comes across as a very rational person. I hate when I'm reading a book and the main character does something really stupid and I feel the need to put the book down and yell. Do you ever get that feeling? Another likable thing about this book is that the romance is in the background. This is a good book with a character who has a crush, not a romance novel. And sometimes you want to escape from thoughts of love and forever, but that can be really hard to do with a YA novel. This book is filled with a bunch of twists, and I didn't call over half of them. Really refreshing. It's a pain when you watch a movie and the main character is walking into the same room as the killer and all you can do is sit and watch. Besides a few loose ends, this book was great. I'm guessing there's going to be a sequel, which I am absolutely looking forward to. Check it out and let me know how you like it! I give this book four stars.