Review: Touch
Series: Denazen – Book 1
Author: Jus Accardo
No of Pages: 251
Release Date: 1 November 2011

When a strange boy tumbles down a river embankment and lands at her feet, seventeen-year-old adrenaline junkie Deznee Cross snatches the opportunity to piss off her father by bringing the mysterious hottie with ice blue eyes home.

Except there’s something off with Kale. He wears her shoes in the shower, is overly fascinated with things like DVDs and vases, and acts like she’ll turn to dust if he touches her. It’s not until Dez’s father shows up, wielding a gun and knowing more about Kale than he should, that Dez realizes there’s more to this boy—and her father’s “law firm”—than she realized.

Kale has been a prisoner of Denazen Corporation—an organization devoted to collecting “special” kids known as Sixes and using them as weapons—his entire life. And, oh yeah, his touch? It kills. The two team up with a group of rogue Sixes hellbent on taking down Denazen before they’re caught and her father discovers the biggest secret of all. A secret Dez has spent her life keeping safe.

A secret Kale will kill to protect.

My Thoughts:

If the rest of this series is going to be anything like the first book, then Accardo has written a winner.

Dez has parental issues; she does things just to annoy her father to see what kinds of reactions she can get out of him. She parties, keeps dubious company and makes sure to do the opposite of everything he says. So when he takes a shot at a random guy she just met, it’s Dez’s first instinct to side with the strange boy. As Dez learns more about Kale, more about herself and more about her father’s business she realizes that there is much more to life that antagonizing her dad.

Dez for me was a little all bark no bite. She talked herself up a lot, but I couldn’t really see her as a tough girl, she was a little stupid for my tastes but she also owned it. She wasn’t dumb in a way that it annoyed me, or detracted from her character, she is just naturally arrogant. If she were any different it wouldn’t have been believable and I think Accardo walked an amazing line between true teenaged rebel girl and annoying teenage stereotype.

Kale was an interesting character for me, he has no knowledge of the outside world after having been cooped up in a facility his entire life, and normal things are phenomenal to him. Again Kale irritated me slightly because of his serious nature, but again if were any different the story wouldn’t have been believable. I may prefer my men with a little more light-heartedness, but Kale wore the broody haunted male with such perfection that he couldn’t have been given to us any other way.

Accardo’s writing in Touch is incredible, there are so many minute lines that she is treading with her mix of teen angst and romance, action and suspense. It could have been a cliché but instead it was an exhilarating ride right from the very first scene. Accardo’s characters weren’t typical of YA and that is what I love most about them, they were normal teens, but even more so they were rational.

Kale is in love with Dez, she is the first person he has ever been able to touch without her being turned to dust in front of him so he thinks that she is the one for him. While Dez feels the same for Kale she has that rationality behind her thoughts which she voices more than once, that while she may love Kale she is pretty sure that if he were able to touch anyone else without killing them, he may lose his infatuation with her. There isn’t that idiotic mentality of destined, true-love which seems to be the theme of today’s YA. Accardo’s romance was realistic.

I think this is why I loved Touch so much; that as fantastical as it may be, it was rational to the point where it was realistic, and it was believable. Touch is one of those stories that makes you think – you know, she has a point, who says some of us can’t have a mutant sixth chromosome – magic wasn’t really a player in Touch, there was science behind it which gave it it’s backing and although I love magic, sometimes I want a rational way to believe that superpowers could be real. Touch does that for me.

Accardo had me hooked on her world from the first page. Her characters weren’t my regular cup of tea, but I loved them all the same because they were real, they were fleshed out, they had real problems and real feelings and things weren’t forced to fit the story.

Touch was a treat for me to read because it strays from the stereotypes of the YA genre without moving into a completely new category, I loved it from start to finish and I am absolutely itching to get my hands on the next in this series, Toxic.

Also in this series:

Untouhed
Toxic
Tremble

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