Adaptation by Malinda Lo

Release Date: Out now!

Publisher: Little Brown Books

Pages: 400pgs

The Story

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 forcing 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.

The Review

Malinda Lo is an incredible storyteller - there's no denying that fact. But for her newest release and the first installment of her next YA series, ADAPTATION is a book that cleverly steps away from the fantasy genre and straight into the world of the weird-but-addictive-as-hell science fiction. From birds falling from the sky, people waking up in strange hospitals with little idea on how they got there in the first place and with best friends feeling almost like strangers within their own bodies . . . in all honestly the author had really blown me away with this book and boy was a grand masterpiece for me, especially since I'm a huge science fiction geek so . . . it does take a whole lot of talent to impress me in that genre alone. And Malinda Lo did all of that!

I think what impressed me even more - and went beyond the awesome characters themselves - was the storytelling all on its own and how the author managed to only give us small pieces of a very gigantic puzzle in each of the chapters we read. It really got me thinking, you know? It was also a very clever technique to use too (the one that makes you question everything) because in delivering a book that can quite easily be compared to the X-Files and another favourite book of mine Ultraviolet by R.J. Anderson, it's a very hard thing to write and to keep readers satisfied with, but for ADAPTATION in particular it somehow worked perfectly and I thought it delivered everything I wanted in the sci-fi elements because  the book was so complicated and yet so compelling . . . even when you're always left to second-guess what is really going on with the characters and what surrounds them. It was needless to say SO FREAKIN' AWESOME and it's just the kind of book that is so hard to describe to you, so you'll just have to read it for yourselves to find out just how weird, cool, compelling, complicated, and what-the-hell moments this book holds together. Trust me your mind will spin!

While I won't get into too much depth about the characters (it will definitely spoil things if I did!), but what I love about Malinda Lo's characters - especially when it comes to her main ones - is when she explores her character's sexuality and writing about how exactly they deal with these difficult issues for these much older teens to understand themselves. I mean, for me having the simple storyline of girl-meets-boy and girl-falls-for-boy-ONLY is something that feels and comes across as very natural to me when I read young adult fiction because it's always there the girl-boy relationship and that's how most YA books go, and yet Lo puts a unique spin to her own books in writing something that is similar in a way but it was also something that was quite different too: Girl-meets-boy-but-girl-also-develops-feelings-for-a-girl.

Yup. Now for her to make her book that unique in the YA genre I definitely think it's a wonderful thing to have for her older teen readers - even adults, and even when it might cause a slight stir to some readers and make them uncomfortable at times. But I, for one, am very comfortable with it. In fact, I applaud the author for writing it and handling it so well in her writing as she's done in her other books. Whether you approve of what happens or not between the main character and her supporting ones, the author, Malinda Lo, knows her characters and because of her main character, Reese, is conflicted with her strong feelings for a boy AND a girl . . . it's just apart of the story in her figuring out who she is as an individual and to me there's nothing wrong with that . . . so once again it's a wonderful thing and I loved the journey Lo took us on. Especially with Reese's story. It was one hell of a ride!

Overall, once the final reveal draws to a close, ADAPTATION will leave you with so many unanswered questions and yet you will still be gearing up for the next installment which is coming out sometime next year! So if you love the sci-fi genre and all the weirdness of it that you can possibly imagine - a book that will make you distrust everything surrounding the characters and their motives - not to mention secrets that they keep, then I would highly HIGHLY recommend this book to you. Seriously it was a BLAST!

The Rating

5/5 stars