Book Review: Unchanged by Jessica Brody

9791910Genre: 

Young Adult, viagra approved Contemporary, Romance

Pages: 

432

Part of a Series?:

The finale in the Unremembered Trilogy

Release Date: 

February 24th, 2015

You Can Find the Book At:

GoodReads

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Book Depository

Author Website

GoodReads Summary: 

In this mesmerizing conclusion to the Unremembered trilogy, Sera will fight those who have broken her.

After returning to the Diotech compound and receiving a successful memory transplant, Seraphina is now living a happy life with another synthetically engineered human like herself, with whom she is deeply in love. She has no recollection of Zen. But the nagging feeling that something is missing from her life continues to plague her. Diotech’s newest product is about to be revealed—a line of genetic modifications that will allow people to live longer, fight disease, and change any unfavorable physical attribute they desire.

As more secrets are revealed, more enemies are uncovered, and the reality of a Diotech-controlled world grows closer every day, Sera and Zen must find a way to destroy the company that created her, or they’ll be separated forever.

My Review:

While this review will not contain spoilers for Unchanged, there will be spoilers for Unremembered and Unforgotten. Please click those titles to read those reviews. 

It took me awhile to review this book only because it took so long for me to recover from this series. I’ve been enjoying it from the very beginning and I’ve enjoyed becoming friends with Jessica, because this is just such a great series and who wouldn’t be stoked to be friends with a cool author? PLUS this series has been inspirational in my own science fiction writing.

Moving on.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to buy this book because I’m kind of broke right now and I can’t afford books right now (I know, it sucks). Luckily, on release day, I got a gift card to Barnes and Noble for my birthday and I knew exactly what I wanted to buy. I bought it, came home and proceeded to read it in about 3 hours.

Zen – I loved the person he’s become. He’s still Zen. He’s still the boy that we’ve fallen in love with from the first two books. But he’s changed a lot, and we see a different side of him because the Sera we get to know in this book is not the Sera of the first two books. She is massively confused by Zen. She’s told to hate him, that he manipulated her, all those sorts of things but she remembers him and their moments and its incredibly confusing for her. And Zen has hardened, and he’s focused and its more than just his love for Sera at this moment. I really like what he’s become in this book.

Sera – When we meet up with Sera again in the novel, she’s been wiped again, so she’s massively in love with Kaelen and completely on the side of Diotech. And you’d think you would be frustrated with her, and that you would just be counting down the minutes until she wasn’t like that anymore. But the more you read it, the depth that you have in her mind, the way they’ve changed her since she left Zen, even her interactions with Zen and Kaelen…I get it. I get it from the beginning to end. Sera is a complicated character. I can’t go more into that without spoilers but she’s complicated. She loves Zen and Kaelen but there’s so much more to that…

Which leaves me to the OMG moment that Jessica does in the book. I honestly didn’t know how this was going to end, or what Sera was going to uncover or anything but when you hit that a-ha moment and everything comes to light, I was just floored. I didn’t see that coming. It made so much sense but it just BLEW my mind. Especially with the end. Its not the end I expected. It certainly wasn’t the end that I was hoping for, or that I think a lot of readers would hope for. But its also the exact ending that makes sense and is so perfect. I had to reread the last twenty pages because it was a whirlwind but I loved every single bit of it. It was so unexpected but I just loved it. I loved that I was able to be SO surprised at the end.

In the past year or so, I’ve read a LOT of series enders. A lot of series have ended, and some of them have ended really well and some have been really disappointing. Reading this book made me incredibly happy. Not only did it wrap up everything that we had been reading in the first two books, but it presented new problems and new information, but it tied it all together in one incredible end. Jessica’s world building is on point, her writing is beautiful and addicting and her story is one that I won’t forget any time soon. Its unique and engaging and absolutely beautiful and it left me breathless and unable to do anything else but sit and my head and just go, “WHOA!” at the end.

Keep writing Jessica, and I’ll keep reading :)

Rating: 

5 out of 5 Stars

Thoughts on the Delirium Pilot

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About a year ago, hospital the pilot for a TV show called Delirium, cheapest based on the best selling trilogy by Lauren Oliver, hit the desks of someone important somewhere and that important someone took a pass.

And I was fairly disappointed. Let me be clear on this: I’m not a massive fan of the Delirium trilogy. I think it has a great concept but it was not played out well over three books. I was very disappointed in the finale book and I thought that a TV show could perhaps take the concept that Lauren created and turn it into a better story. But alas, that was not to happen.

That being said: Delirium has a great concept. Its a world not unlike our own, but for one thing: love has been labeled an actual disease and everyone must receive the cure at the age of 18. Lena Haloway can’t wait to get the cure, especially since her mother committed suicide from being much too in love with Lena’s father, who had long since passed. However, Lena meets Alex, who shows her a world outside the one she’s known and she starts questioning whether love really is a disease.

I really thought this could make a great TV show.

Just in the last week, however, there was an announcement that the pilot episode would be available for a limited time to be viewed on Hulu. It was released yesterday and, of course, I had to sit down and watch the pilot. Here are my thoughts:

I warn you: if you haven’t read any books of the Delirium trilogy, I would refrain from reading this post. It will have book spoilers in it.

delirium-pilot1

What I Liked:

None of the actors, except perhaps Gregg Sulkin, were at all even close to what I pictured for the characters. However, I really thought that all of them captured what each character was feeling and how they felt. One that particularly jumped out to me was Daren Kagasoff as Alex. He was SO not what I pictured as Alex but I thought he captured the essence of him and that was really important to me.

I liked that they brought in Julian earlier. Julian makes his first appearance in the second novel, Pandemonium, and he certainly does not live next door to Hana. I liked that they kept up the curiosity of his character, and that he still had the sickness that kept him from getting the cure but I loved that they sort of seemed to be changing the direction he was headed in, from the book. In the book, he becomes a love interest of Lena and that annoyed me to no end. In the show, it showed more of a connection between him and Hana and I was kind of okay with that.

It stayed kind of close to the first book, and that’s the only book I really like in the trilogy. I thought that Delirium was a strong start but Pandemonium and Requiem just didn’t stick the landing. So when the pilot took a lot of familiar scenes from Delirium, I was fairly happy with that.

What I Didn’t Like: 

Yeah, it stayed close to the book…it did the entire first book in the entire first episode! I know there are two more books, and writers can do whatever they want once a book becomes a television show (look at The Vampire Diaries) but it just was so weird to me. It went from Lena’s failed evaluation all the way to when she escapes over the fence and Alex is shot.

And that being said, everything felt so rushed. In my opinion, the first season could have been the entire book of Delirium but they rushed it and I’m not really sure why. I can’t see the purpose behind it because it just seemed to be rushed character and story development. The pilot opens with Lena explaining about deliria, and the cure, and how she can’t wait for it, and by the end of the episode, she’s avoiding the cure, and running from the police, to the “safety” outside the fence. That literally takes an entire book of story and character development for her to get to that point and they accomplished that in one episode…but not in a good way. It felt incredibly rushed, like an incredibly rushed movie version of the first book and that disappointed me.

Now, perhaps if they had continued with episodes, I could see the direction they were going with and maybe it would have made more sense to me. But it just didn’t, and I could see why it wasn’t picked up for a full show. I was annoyed at how fast everything happened. No one, even those who haven’t read the books, could honestly believe that Lena goes through that change so quickly. It was just very rushed and sloppily done.

I also felt like they could have emphasized more how the cure changes you, makes you sort of robotic and without real feeling. We kind of got that with Lena’s sister but not enough to really know what the cure does to you. Why would Lena scream and kick at the idea of getting it if we don’t *really* know what it does to you?

In The End: 

I just didn’t like it. The more I thought about it, the more I was disappointed in how it went. It had the concept and it had the potential. The actors really embodied their characters, even though they’re not what I pictured and the world seemed really well built. I liked what they had started.

However, I felt, just like with the books, that they just didn’t execute it as well as they could have. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I just wasn’t happy with it. It was entirely too rushed, and you didn’t really have time to connect with the characters before they were thrown in a tailspin. Hana betrays Lena and tells her sister about Lena’s feelings. How am I supposed to care? We’ve only had an hour-ish to really love their friendship so what is it to me that there was this betrayal. Alex gets shot. Who cares? You’ve only watched one episode with him, how can you be attached to him? You can’t, honestly, and I feel like they needed to stretch out the storylines, give us a chance to get to know each character and watch them develop and change. Watch Alex and Lena fall in love, watch Lena change her mind, watch Hana change her mind, and it honestly would have been a much better pilot.

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