Uninvited (Uninvited #1)

One often thinks that an author's second series can never outdo an author's first. That theory is DEAD wrong! Uninvited blew the Firelight trilogy out of the water! It was so good and so much fun. I read it in 24 hours tops, on a school day no less. Let me tell you, when this book comes out, drop everything and read it! It is so good and so amazing. It made me feel for the characters, I just wanted to slap so many of them silly! It shows prejudices in a new light, and almost feels like how Divergent might have started off before the Purity War.

The main character is Davy Hamilton. She is so cool. She's a musical genius, who, when she is notified of being a Carrier of the 'kill gene' loses everything. Yet Davy, for the most part, takes it in stride. Things get continually worse for her, and she has to deal with it every day. There were two characters she had to deal with who made her life miserable more so than anyone else and I have to say, I wish more had been done/said about them, like, you know, they were killed or something. :) Davy meets Sean right off the bat and is scared to death of him. Why? He's a Carrier, like her, but already has the mark of someone who has committed violence. And yet somehow, the two of them end up caring and protecting each other. Depending on how the rest of the series goes, I could see a love triangle coming up, but at the moment, the second guy is too small of a character. Also, Davy has an older brother who is the bestest of best sibling/family character EVER! He cares about her so much and sees beyond the label she's been given.

The ending of this book. Holy bleep, the end of this book. The last fourth of the book or so was NOT what I was expecting. A huge turnaround that pushed the plot into a whole other universe! The book only takes place seven years in the future, but that suddenly made it feel truly dystopian. As far as the end end goes, I need more!

Read it! Read it until you're near tears and yelling in the middle of the night at characters that exist on the beautiful pages of the book in your hands. Read it so that your friends give you crazy looks and you feel like you can't read anything ever again. The plot was fast, the romance was hot, the book was tense, and most importantly, the love ran deep. Davy has been told that she doesn't need to be this bad person they've made her out to be, and now she's out to prove it. A complete and utter five star review!

I wanted to read Uninvited because the synopsis appealed to me. I can't imagine isolating a gene like that and then all of the sudden being told that you have the killer gene. The ramifications as well as the fallout, friends and possibly family isolating you, jobs, school, and how you're viewed all changed in an instant intrigues me and I like the premise. I've also been wanting to read something by Sophie Jordan because I know her other series was popular but I just haven't had a chance to get caught up, so with a new series, I have a new chance.
I connected with Davy, she is smart and good at music, something I admire in others but have no talent for myself. Her reactions to finding out she had the gene was emotional, and lived up to what I was expecting. I can't imagine myself in her shoes, but I imagine that I would react similarly. She is naive at times, but I love how her world view is forced to shift as she fights against being labeled. But she discovers others that she sympathizes, connects with, wonders why they are marked, or are they like her and feel they are there by mistake. She is a rich white female, so she doesn't fit the profile of a violent person, someone capable of murder, and that leaves her with less in common with others in the Cage, the other carriers at her new school. But as she gets to know some of them, they have more in common than she'd once thought, even if only their future has been jerked from them and they have limited options for college, jobs, and the rest of their lives.
As for as romance, at the very beginning, I had to keep telling myself not to like Zac, the above mentioned boyfriend in the synopsis, because I knew that regardless of the chemistry they had, that he was going to be a douche. Sure enough, even though he wasn't as bad as her other friends, he still proved himself unworthy.
The mystery of Sean was great. He was an enigma in the HTS world, people seemed to fear him, and I wanted to know why. Because each encounter he had with Davy was intense, but he showed kindness to her. There is some incredible tension between the two, and it was easy to start rooting for a romance between them instead of silly old Zac. He showed up at just the right time to help her and get her out of tough situations, or just to help her pick herself up off the floor when she's down.
The pacing was great, as well as easing us into the changes in the world, while at the same time providing the details we need to know in a unique format. At the beginning of some chapters, there are short government fyi's or convos between senators and those leading the program in charge of those with HTS, or even between Zac and her friend Tori. It kept my attention at all times, whether its character development and change of Davy, mystery with Sean, building the relationship between Davy and her troublemaker but non-HTS carrier Mitchell, to other action that moved the plot along.
Thinking back though, the world building didn't make sense in a few areas, especially New Haven. Their abilities and why they were chosen if they were just to be trained for fighting kinda puzzled me, but this may be revealed in the next book. That aside, that doesn't take away any of my enjoyment of the series, it is one that I didn't want to put down.
The ending wrapped up the threads of this book pretty well, and I am excited to get into the next book of the series to see what happened after the exciting ending.

Bottom Line: Action packed with a likable main character who gets tougher as she's trust into a whole new and intriguing to me world.

Oh man, I really, REALLY liked this one. I had never read any of Sophie Jordan's work before but when I was auto-approved awhile back for all of HarperTeen's titles on Edelweiss, I snatched this one up in a hurry.I was so hoping that I wouldn't be disappointed. And I wasn't. I was fully thrust into this world where it is so very much like it was prior to the end of segregation of African Americans and Caucasians.

Davina "Davy" Hamilton has a bright future but all of that comes to a crushing, heartbreaking end when she is found to be carrying the HTS gene. Suddenly, all her friends abandon her, her boyfriend ditches her and her parents seem afraid of her. She is now sent to a different school where the carriers are separated from the other students, the normal ones who don't carry this gene.

Davy's lost everything and I could feel the grief through the pages of the book.Suddenly she's friendless and terrified.She's thrust into a room at her new school that's dubbed The Cage. It's here where she meets both allies and adversaries.I really liked Coco from what little we saw of her and I was really wishing she was more of a presence in this book.

Now to the guys who were very mysterious initially, although they couldn't have been any different. Gil was more outgoing and friendly. Sean was quiet and not all that friendly. He definitely wasn't mean to Davy, but he definitely had an edge to him.Maybe it was the HTS thing or maybe it was his home situation, but I think it was a combination of both.

As quickly as her former friends turned against her, I never would have believed that her ex boyfriend and her ex best friend along with other kids would have turned her in for a seemingly minor crime. But they did and I was heartbroken for Davy.It wasn't right and it made Davy feel even more hopeless.

When she's given an unexpected opportunity, she takes it instantly. What she doesn't know is that by taking this offer, she's putting herself in even more danger.Soon she meets other kids like her, who have the HTS gene. She meets more adversaries and one more ally, all the while trying to ignore her growing feelings for Sean.

Watching that relationship slowly develop was awesome. It wasn't a case of insta-love, thank goodness. Sean worked his butt off to protect Davy throughout this book. They were friends long before they became anything else.Their romance added a bright light in a very bleak world.

Oh my goodness, I almost forgot to mention the FEELS. Ohhhh boy there were a lot of feels for me in this book. Not just one or two feels either. A whole range of feels. From sadness, to happiness to glee and many other feels.Books that give me these kinds of feels are always going to be some of my favorites.

I really did enjoy this book a lot. There are only a few things I didn't like so much. I wish we had learned how the HTS gene was discovered and a little back-story on that. I also didn't like Davy's parents that much. I know they were scared but I didn't particularly love the way they treated Davy. It wasn't like she asked for this gene. Her brother was awesome though. He seems bound and determined not to see Davy as a threat to his safety. He treats her normally unlike her parents and her former friends.

I cannot wait to read the final book in the duology. I have a feeling that it will be amazing.So go read it if you like action, romance and above all, books that make you feel.