Book Review - Control by Lydia Kang

Recommended for: Fans of YA and or Sci-Fi

Rating: 5 Stars Highly recommended

In a future world where genetically altered people are shunned by society to the point of exile, one girl must cope with the loss of one family and the stress of gaining a new one.

Control is another YA novel set in the future, where man has created his own minority. Scientists have been experimenting with human DNA resulting in people with “traits.” These traits are special abilities that include enhanced healing, breathable skin, and slow aging to name a few.

The protagonist is a seventeen-year-old girl named Zelia who moves around a lot with her father and sister. After her father is killed in a car accident, her sister is kidnapped from the hospital. Zelia finds a home with a group of genetically altered teenagers and tries to find a way to get her sister back.

The plot is very fast paced. It arrives in the second chapter and takes a firm grip on you until the very end. The main character Zelia is intelligent, determined, stubborn, and brave. The minor characters include a boy with four arms, another with two heads, and a girl with green skin.

There is also the underlying mystery of who Zelia’s father. How did he know the people that took Zelia’s sister and how does he know her new surrogate family, it is one of the things Zelia learns about in her character development.

While the story is captivating and there are plenty of interesting characters to keep your interest, “Control” does experience some of the typical YA pitfalls. A romance comes dangerously close to becoming a love triangle. Zelia’s love interest is a very typical broody, sarcastic, obnoxious boy that Zelia hates at first despite the fact that she finds him attractive. They fight and fight until her boy admits that he is in love with her and there is a new couple.

Some readers may be turned off a bit by the science that fills the pages. The characters spend a lot of time in labs doing experiments with DNA. It does not get as involved as it could have been. The author Lydia Kang is a physician, so she probably knows much more than she put in. The science is not overwhelming though unless you have a complete phobia of beakers and theoretical physics.

Overall, I would say that this one is worth the read. I look forward to seeing how this story progresses.