Review: Aversion

Title: Aversion (The Mentalist Series #1)
Author: Kenechi Udogu
Page Count: 133
My Rating: 4 TURTLES: A great read, I definitely recommend.
*I received this book in exchange for an honest review
Amazon

Description:
For Gemma Green’s first time, things should have been straightforward. Find your subject, hold their gaze and push a thought into their head to save them from future disaster – Aversion complete. A pretty simple process given that the subject was to have no recollection of the experience. But Russ Tanner doesn’t seem to want to forget. In fact the more she tries to avoid him, the more he pushes to get to know her. Gemma knows she has a problem but is she facing the side effects of a failed Aversion or has the school’s tennis champ really fallen for her?

Review:

I’ve seen other reviewers compare this book to The Adjustment Bureau, and I definitely have to agree. Crossing The Adjustment Bureau with a contemporary YA novel and adding a dash of I Am Number Four is the closest I can come to describing this book. The combination works really well and the book grabbed and held my attention from start to finish. 

It is fun to see the popular-guy-falls-for-not-so-popular-girl trope of contemporary YA appear side-by-side with Gemma discovering secrets about her parents and developing her powers. Although some aspects of the plot were familiar, these familiarities did not come off as trite. This is possibly because the plot was so unpredictable. Each new twist made sense within the context of the story, but I did not see it coming.

One thing I wished had been different with this story, though, is that I wish it had been longer. Its short length does make it very past faced, with every scene moving the plot along. And, while I love it when books have a sense of urgency to them, I felt like there could have been some more scenes to flesh out the story more. I was thinking of other contemporary YA tropes and waiting for Gemma and Russ to go on a field trip together and bond or get to know each other better when they were assigned lab partners, but since everything was so lean there were not any of these extra scenes. I think if this book were longer it would have given me a better grasp of setting and character and made the conclusion more emotional. That said, I still really enjoyed this book and think it manages to do quite a lot in a short amount of time.

I would definitely recommend this book, especially to readers of YA. Also, if you read it and love it, books two and three are already out so there’s no agonizing wait for a sequel! 





Disclosure: this post contains links to an affiliate program (Amazon), for which I receive a few cents if you make purchases.