REVIEW Revived by Cat Patrick

Revived
by Cat Patrick
Hardcover
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
May 8, 2012

As a little girl, Daisy Appleby was killed in a school bus crash. Moments after the accident, she was brought back to life.

A secret government agency has developed a drug called Revive that can bring people back from the dead, and Daisy Appleby, a test subject, has been Revived five times in fifteen years. Daisy takes extraordinary risks, knowing that she can beat death, but each new death also means a new name, a new city, and a new life. When she meets Matt McKean, Daisy begins to question the moral implications of Revive, and as she discovers the agency’s true goals, she realizes she’s at the center of something much larger—and more sinister—than she ever imagined.

This book was WAY more serious than I anticipated it to be, and it was SO GOOD because of that fact.  I'm not sure what I was expecting, but Revived went above and beyond my expectations.  I think I was expecting something kind of fluffy, something where Daisy is kind of learning what she can do as she's drawn into a whole Reviving society.  I don't know.

But it wasn't that at all.  IT WAS BETTER.

After dying AGAIN, Daisy and her pseudo-parents have picked up and moved.  She's starting over and for once she's actually trying to be normal.  She's going to make friends.  That's where Audrey and Matt come in.  She bonds with Audrey from the get-go, and it doesn't hurt anything that her brother Matt is super-hot.  But as she gets closer to the siblings, she starts to wonder about the thing she's taken for granted ever since she was a kid--the fact that if she dies, it isn't the end.  She's been brought back again and again, and as she gets close to her new friends (and, in Matt's case, something more) the whole issue of morality and mortality start turning over in her mind.

Why does she get to live?  Why has she been chosen to be brought back to life again and again?  And why are the kids that died in the bus crash with her when she was little the only ones who get to use Revive?

But Daisy starts asking too many questions, and before long, everything starts to crumble down around her.

This book had a fabulously unexpected premise.  The bonds that Daisy made with Matt and Audrey were so wonderful.  They were almost difficult to read as Daisy was going through such a hard time as she made such deep connections with people outside the program for the first time in her life.  The science-fiction element in this story was compelling, and the relationships tugged at my heartstrings.

Great read!

-geekgirl