Adaptation by Malinda Lo

Reese and her debate partner David are on their way home from the national competition in Arizona when their flight is cancelled after flocks of birds cause planes around the country to crash. Freaked out and desperate to get home to San Francisco, they begin driving...only to crash in the middle of the desert when a bird flies into the headlights. Reese wakes up almost a month later in a top secret government medical facility and is barely given time to process what has happened to her before she's forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement and sent back home. She is not home long before she meets Amber and is shocked by the intense physical attraction she feels for her. Amber is funny and impulsive, but mysterious...and there is a chance that she is somehow connected to what happened to Reese and the strange memories that are beginning to surface from her month-long coma.

Adaptation is a sharp and intense sci-fi thriller. Lo quickly establishes and builds up tension as planes come crashing to the ground and the conventional news sources quickly become unreliable, and ratchets it up with the strange encounters at the government medical facility and the complete lack of answers Reese and David face when they are finally sent home. Adjusting to life back home in San Francisco, familiar yet strange enough to unsettle Reese, would be boring if not for the introduction of Amber's character. Reese’s electric attraction to and romance with Amber forces her to question not just what happened to her a month earlier, but how she is changing now, and what her feelings for Amber will mean in her life. Just when Reese is ready to accept the idea that something in her is irrevocably changed and Amber is somehow involved, Lo takes the readers on a whirlwind race for the shocking answers about what happened to Reese and David, who Amber really is, and what it means for the characters, their futures, and their country. This quick, smart book effortlessly blends conspiracy theories, top-secret government cover-ups, extra-terrestrials, and romance and the result is a straightforward and highly entertaining novel with an admirable heroine and a hot, unconventional love triangle. Adaptation is an excellent read and Lo a talented, incisive writer.

Cover Comments: I am loving this cover. I love the reflection, the way the title is slightly out of focus. It's creepy and very unsettling, like this book. 

Review copy provided by publisher.