Book Review: The Altered (The Altered #1)

January 1, 2023 6 Comments

Happy New Year!

Whatever your resolutions may be, I wish you a successful and happy new start on the next page of your life’s journey. I don’t have any definitive goals besides what I already had, so I’m happy to continue my present course. Speaking of which, I finished reading another book!

This time I read The Altered by Maria DeVivo.

Maria and I share a publisher in Solstice Publishing, and we quickly became friends on social media. This read was a part of my TBR catchup, and I’ve been aching to try this out because I love horror and zombies!

So, how did this read go? Keep on reading for my review!

Blurb

Griffin King is an ordinary high school senior dealing with typical teenage issues – a bratty little sister, overbearing parents, an obnoxious best friend, and the unrequited love of his long-time crush. But when a virus suddenly infects a large portion of the population, Griffin soon finds himself on the opposite side of the proverbial horror story.After months of roaming the broken landscape of the city as an infected person, a cure is found and a mass injection of antiserum is administered to the diseased, causing Griffin to become one of the ALTERED, a small group of ‘ex-infecteds’ who have been cured, but changed. Now he must learn how to start his life anew – suppressing his need to consume human flesh, and living among an angry post-apocalyptic society where race, gender, and religion don’t matter anymore. Welcome to the new world. A world where people like him – people altered like him – are the minority.

GoodReads

Amazon

***Brief disclosure***

I am an Amazon affiliate and earn a tiny commission for purchases made through the Amazon links in this post at no cost to you. It’s a great way to help me keep things running on my blog if you’re already intrigued enough to make a purchase.

The Review

This is my first time reading something by DeVivo and I just have to say wow, what a stellar zombie read!

The Altered focuses on Griffin, your average high schooler. He’s got a bratty little sister, an annoying friend, and a massive crush on the alluring Lana Anderson. That is, until the world changed and people became flesh-eating monsters. Griffin has woken up after months of roaming the streets as one of those ghouls, but thanks to an experimental treatment he’s become ‘altered’. What does this mean for him, and what happened to the world in all that time? As Griffin recalls his chilling recent past, he discovers just how far he’s gone and how far he has to go in this changed world.

I don’t always see eye to eye with character-focused novels, but this one was expertly handled.

Griffin is a great MC. He’s relatable as he was before and during the chaos, but his ‘altered’ status in the present makes him something of an enigma. He has this intriguing clashing duality between his conscious self and his zombie side that made every chapter engaging, and I found it hard to put this book down.

The plot switches from present to past, but in a constructed way that’s easy to follow and understand. I honestly didn’t have a favorite part, as both the past and present had vital clues to the depth of Griffin’s suffering and what the current state of the world was, especially how normal people were changed.

This was a great and unique zombie world , and I’ll gladly be continuing this series. I highly recommend giving it a try!

That’s A Wrap!

Well that’s it for this book review. I hope you enjoyed it!

Have you read this book? Are there other similar books you’ve read that you simply have to gush about? Feel free to leave a comment. I’d love to start a conversation!

Have a great day!