An Anomaly

Looking for a modern-day YA paranormal book that doesn’t involve vampires and werewolves? Anomaly by Tonya Kuper has teens with the ability to bend reality and a good old-fashioned Evil Consortium vs. Tenacious Resistance power struggle, with some pretty kick-ass fight sequences.

Things just keep going from bad to worse on Josie’s 17th birthday. Her dad’s inexplicably missing, her older brother Nick is dead, her mom’s all distant and weird, her boyfriend just dumped her in front of all her friends, and she just found out her summer internship fell through. And that’s all before she learns she has superpowers that an evil consortium wants to kill her for! At least a super-hot guy shows up out of nowhere and only has eyes for her. But Reid’s not what he appears to be.

Reid and his friend Santos have been sent to train Josie to use her Oculi powers. What Josie doesn’t realize yet is that Reid is hiding their shared past from her, and that there are a hell of a lot of things she never knew about herself and her family. Josie and Reid are both Anomalies, which is the rarest kind of Oculi. Not only can they make virtually anything appear just by envisioning it and “pushing” it into reality, they can also make things disappear just as easily. (Most Oculi are Pushers or Retractors, who can only create or disappear objects, not both.)

What I loved about the book:

• Josie was a big old self-professed dork, and completely unapologetic about her love of all things sci-fi. She was also a physics whiz and never hid her intelligence.
• No love triangle! Sure, they work sometimes, but they’re so freaking trite.
• The build-up of the attraction between Josie and Reid was pretty realistic. They have some pretty big obstacles to overcome and things almost never progress smoothly, but it makes sense for them to end up together.
• (Mild spoiler!) Kuper also strikes a nice balance with their eventual physical relationship. I hate when YA characters are so madly in love that they turn their world upside down for each other, yet never progress beyond longing gazes and awkward hugs.
• The training and action sequences have a good amount of tension, plus it’s kinda awesome that they can just make knives and guns appear and disappear at will.
• A subplot involving the vice-president let me picture Joe Biden with superpowers. It wasn’t actually Biden, but just pretend it was.
• I really enjoyed the relationship between Josie and her best friend Hannah. Hannah is delightfully upbeat without being too much of a Sassy Black Friend™ (ok, maybe a little bit). They also genuinely like each other; too often books make teen girls bffs into rivals who snipe at each other all the time.

What didn’t work so well:

• Josie’s geekery showed up in every single metaphor and figure of speech. I mean, I was a huge Star Wars geek when I was that age (and let’s face it, I still am), but I never thought things like, “[A] weight of obligation settled on my shoulders with the force of a landing Y-wing,” or said “Thank Asgard” or “Dear Loki!”
• The “scientific” explanation of Oculi powers was pretty absurd, but it didn’t bug me too much.
• I kinda hated Josie’s mom. I know she’d been through a hell of a lot, but Josie deserved better.
• There was one scene at the end that I had to reread three times because an interaction is described one way and turns out to have happened differently, with no explanation as to why one character would have faked out the other. It turned out to be a kinda big plot point, especially if the planned trilogy is completed, but it didn’t really make sense as written.

All in all the book was enjoyable, and I’m looking forward to the sequels to see how everything turns out.

I received a free e-book copy of Anomaly from Entangled Teen via Netgalley in exchange for my honest opinion. This review initially appeared at Persephone Magazine and is reprinted with permission.