Adaptation Review

TITLE Adaptation (Adaptation #1)
AUTHOR Malinda Lo
PUBLICATION September 18th 2012 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
READ September 9 - 12, 2012

Reese can’t remember anything from the time between the accident and the day she woke up almost a month later. She only knows one thing: She’s different now.

Across North America, flocks of birds hurl themselves into airplanes, causing at least a dozen to crash. Thousands of people die. Fearing terrorism, the United States government grounds all flights, and millions of travelers are stranded.

Reese and her debate team partner and longtime crush David are in Arizona when it happens. Everyone knows the world will never be the same. On their drive home to San Francisco, along a stretch of empty highway at night in the middle of Nevada, a bird flies into their headlights. The car flips over. When they wake up in a military hospital, the doctor won’t tell them what happened, where they are—or how they’ve been miraculously healed.

Things become even stranger when Reese returns home. San Francisco feels like a different place with police enforcing curfew, hazmat teams collecting dead birds, and a strange presence that seems to be following her. When Reese unexpectedly collides with the beautiful Amber Gray, her search for the truth is forced in an entirely new direction—and threatens to expose a vast global conspiracy that the government has worked for decades to keep secret.

I grew up watching horror movies, probably long before I should have ever been watching them. When I think back there is one movie that sticks out as having actually scared the crap out of me, that movie is Fire In The Sky. There's something about people being taken aboard an alien ship in the middle of nowhere and being tested on then coming back changed. It's so creepy, because no one knows about it and these people come back forever changed. Since then the topic has fascinated me, so when I saw the premise for Adaptation I knew I had to read it. This is going to be a hard review to write, because I don't really have too much to say about Adaptation, other than I was very bored throughout.

I guess I'll start with the writing, which grated on my nerves quite a bit throughout. A lot of it felt quite long winded and un necessary to me. There were tidbits of information thrown into sentences that the reader obviously knows, yet Malinda felt the need to reiterate it for some odd reason. I feel as if she should have put all that extra effort into creating more of a back story for her characters. We didn't really find out too much about their past or their feelings so there wasn't enough for me to latch on to and make me actually care about them. This could also be due to the story being written in the third person. I think that if I was in Reese's head for the abduction, the dreams, the exams and the adventure I would have felt a bit more of her desperation, rather than feeling like an outsider not getting enough information.

The beginning of the novel does definitely set off a creepy vibe, we have planes crashing after running into flocks of birds all over America and that is maintained quite well throughout. Once David and Reese return home they are changed and weird things are happening to their bodies. Reese is having odd dreams of being in a bleeding room. It's all very intriguing and I liked how those elements were tied in, I just once again wish that the characters had a bit more to them so I could have latched on to their desperation. We also get a bit of self discovery in this novel as Reese goes through some emotional changes and wonders about her sexuality. There was some worrying from me that we were going to have a new angle on the dreaded love triangle but it really did work itself out in the end and didn't feel like a triangle at all.

Is there enough in Adaptation for me to come back for more? Probably not, though I do have questions. I'll probably just read a review of the next on with lots of spoilers so that I know how it plays out.

A copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.