A Rocking Review of Anna: The Starseed Series #1

Genre: YA Sci-Fi/Mystery

Rating: 3.75 but rounded up to 4 Guitars

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Synopsis

To the outside world, Anna appears to be an ordinary high school senior...

Anna has a lot of questions. Should she pursue her desire to leave home for college and live out her dream of becoming a physicist? Or should she stay home and help care for her family, which has struggled ever since her father died in Afghanistan? Is her crush, Steve, really interested in her, or is he only using the highly intelligent Anna to try and boost his grades in school?

These questions, plus the ordinary trials and tribulations of high school, distract Anna from noticing some very... strange things that are beginning to happen to her.

For as long as Anna can remember, she has had a haphazard smattering of freckles on her arm. But these freckles are starting to change, and cause a series of unnerving hallucinations and odd side effects that only Anna seems to notice. When a strange shadow man starts to haunt her nights, she decides to go on a hunt for the truth to discover, once and for all, what is happening to her. The hallucinations continue growing stronger, however, and each new visit by the shadow man appears to become more and more threatening. Eventually, Anna realizes that she can no longer hide from her friends and family what is happening to her.

But as she shares her secret with those closest to her, Anna never imagines that her very life, and the lives of those she loves, will be put in jeopardy.

Who, or what, is Anna?

Why it Rocked

I was really intrigued by Anna when I got hold of this book. The synopsis sounded fascinating, and I loved the cover, so I was excited to get reading.

The writing was smooth and easy to read, and I was caught up in the first scene and to want to find out more – always a good sign.

I loved the mystery of this book – there were a lot of questions posed in the first few chapters to keep me wanting to read more.

However, I will say that I did have a bit of an issue with this book. There was a fascinating mystery and sci-fi element and I did feel like after it was introduced for long chunks of the book it seemed to be almost completely forgotten and all the emphasis was on the teen drama of dating and boys. Whilst I appreciate a romantic element in a novel I felt like too much time was spent on that for long stretches of the book and the sci-fi mystery was ignored.

The sci-fi stuff didn’t really come back into play to any significant degree until towards the end of the book and so when it did it felt a little rushed and hurried. I was a little disappointed by that. I would have loved to have seen a far greater focus on the mystery. What was there felt out of place amongst the romance.

That said I really liked Anna, the main character. She was bookish and smart, but in a proper way instead of how a lot of authors simply tell us the MC is a geek/nerd and then just throw in a few references to classics or something. Anna really seemed like a smart girl.

All issues aside I do want to read the next book in this series. I’m really intrigued to find out what’s going to happen next as a lot of questions were posed right at the end and it finished on a bit of a cliff hanger.

I’ll be interested to see where this series goes and I still recommend this book to any readers who enjoy sci-fi elements in their books!