Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have another absolute banger on our hands. Should we be surprised? Oh course not! This is Michelle Hodkin we're talking about! The sequel to The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer was just as good as the first and 100 times crazier and more twisted.
If you are reading this because you have just finished the first book and want to know if the other one is worth reading, the answer is yes, but BEWARE OF SPOILERS if you have not read this book yet. I gave The Evolution of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin 5/5 stars on GoodReads and if I could have given it six than I would have. I loved Mara and Noah and I loved all the spookiness!
Currently in the story, Mara knows what she can do, that she can kill people by just thinking about it, and she knows that Noah can heal people by just thinking about it. She knows that Jude is alive now and that her family thinks she's genuinely crazy after what happened in the police station. They think that the only way to reach her is through severe treatment but...
Mara is not crazy.
--I will stand by that statement till death no matter what happens in the third book, which I am so nervous for just for the record.--
However, since she is Mara and she is smarter, sneakier, and more cunning than these people could ever even begin to comprehend, she pretends to acknowledge that she's crazy after the building collapse, that way they think she is working with them.
She does this that way she won't have to go to an in patient center. She needs to make sure she doesn't get shipped off because she is on the hunt for answers about her powers, Jude, how Jude knows so much about her powers.
However, as things start going more and more wrong, it's harder to continue to pretend she's stable and Mara doesn't know if she actually is anymore. If she ever was? Noah is the only one that believes her, but Noah has his own issues and secrets as well.
There is a new level of uncertainty in this book which makes things just as exciting as the last. I couldn't stop reading it!!
Throughout this entire series the author does such a great job at evoking such passionate emotion from the reader. Right off the bat, literally, in the opening lines, I was fully invested in the story because it was so frustrating! The reader is always on Mara's side, I am always rooting for her, but her parents and her brother just don't believe her and it is sooooo annoying!! And then again, when she woke up in the hospital and they all thought that she tried to kill herself, I just wanted to scream IT WAS JUDE!!! I wish she would just tell Daniel straight up because he is a smart kid and he cares about her as his sister a lot clearly, so I really do think he would believe her.
Everything in this book is woven together so perfectly, from Mara's remembering her past and then even remembering what happened before she was even born! When we found out that all of this was basically written in fate to happen to her, I mean comeeeee onnnn, this is insane!!
I didn't see so much coming... especially the ending which literally left me with my mouth wide open in shock. I'm pretty sure I gasped in Starbucks while I was reading it...
They were test subjects!?!? Dr. Kells knew about their powers and was basically the evil genius master mind behind it all! I was shocked. It was like the opposite of the Snape reveal in The Deathly Hallows. I was blown away. I mean, don't get me wrong, I always hated Kells but I didn't realize or even consider that she could be behind all of this the entire time! The idea that the government wants to also see what their extent it, test on them and see what they can do it pretty cool. Not morally right or good for our characters but it takes the story in a crazy direction. Now everything is so much bigger. Before it was just a not so regular old mystery only really involving Mara and Noah, now they know that there are so many more like them. They have been manipulated the whole time and it is insane!! They have been letting Jude mess with Mara by sneaking into her house, her school, the asylum, even the freaking hospital to kill people, for this experiment. It is so much bigger than the reader could ever imagine and I never, ever, saw this coming and I love it. Where this series went right, the Maze Runner went wrong. In the Maze Runner it was so obvious that it was all an experiment but in this it was not at all!
What I also thought was so crazy about this was that when Daniel went in to talk to Mara about going into the inpatient center I seriously thought that she was going crazy. Again, another point like this was when she blacked out and did the creepy thing with the doll, I thought she also was the one who killed the cat and that is when I seriously started doubting her, but thank god I was wrong in the end. I thought that the book would take a turn and tell us that Mara actually is crazy. I never knew because we can only know what Mara knows and not even Mara knows the truth! It's nuts. There were so many points where I was like, okay, now I'm going to find out that Mara has just been crazy and hallucinating this whole time, and I mentally prepared myself to have my world shattered, but then my world shattered in a completely different way because of freaking Dr. Kells. I hate her by the way, but we already got into that...
Finally, as we go into the next book, the last line of this book, I refuse to fool me.
"Noah Shaw: Deceased."
ABSOLUTELY NOT. I will not believe this, and even if it is true I will still refuse to believe it. However, I am also scared that if it is true that I will not like the third book at all, because I fear that a Mara Dyer book would be seriously lacking without Noah's character. He adds so much to the series! I am seriously going to cry if this is one of those books where all the characters you love die... But, those really aren't serious concerns of mine because I just don't believe that someone who has the ability to heal himself and anyone else around him would die in a building collapse. An entire chapter (or more) in this book covered how Mara wouldn't be able to kill him because he is basically invincible, so I'm not buying it, Dr. Kells.
With this whole story line with Mara having visions of her grandmother and the Professor and the doll and the pennant... ya, that is all absolutely insane. Like I said, this story is way more complex than I ever would have thought to be possible when I read the first book. I really did just think this would be another thriller book about teens with special powers, but it is so much bigger than that. This book time and time again one ups itself and I am loving ever single part of it. Is her grandma really dead? Why did she kill herself three days after Mara was born? SO MANY QUESTIONS! This book is so much creepier than the first, with her really teetering between sanity and insanity, and then when she gets to Horizons, and Pheobe is just so wack, and oh my gosh Jamie has powers too!
This book was so insane and so well written and I have seriously no clue what is going to happen next. They can so easily convince everyone that Mara is crazy but she isn't crazy but I am losing hope in all the people that surround Mara because she is just getting screwed over and over again. I seriously can't wait to read the next one!
I loved this book and you probably will too, so give it a read!
Stay super rad, readers,
- C8 ;)
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