REVIEW: Revived by Cat Patrick

I absolutely loooooved Cat Patrick's previous book, Forgotten, and so I was always excited to read more from the same author.  And while I found the premise of Revived to be incredibly interesting, for me, it lacked the emotion that I was expecting.  While I found the book to be wonderfully readable and creepy in parts, I was hoping that I would connect better with the characters and with their relationships to the other people within the book. 

Our main character Daisy is a bit special.  Technically she died in a bus accident when she was five.  But a special and secret government agency brought Daisy back to life and has carried on bringing her back to life using a special drug.  Now, as a teenager, as she's forced to relocate and change her identity after the deaths she has been through, Daisy meets Matt and his sister, Audrey, and through knowing these two people begins to change the way Daisy views her life, her deaths and the morality of the Revive programme.

I thought Daisy was a great character.  She's been living with government agents her entire life.  And government agents who pretend to be her parents are not the same thing as actual, loving, caring and supportive parents.  Daisy is an incredibly lonely girl with only the online friendship of another bus accident survivor, to keep her going. The shared blog that Daisy and  her friend writes is one of my favourite aspects of the novel! It was fun and creative and made both characters instantly more likeable and personable to me.

The Revive programme itself, run by an unknown entity called 'God' was fairly creepy.  There isn't much information given about the programme itself or how and why it came to be, but what there is of it in the novel is enough to inject uneasiness into the tone of the story.  Obviously Daisy is under a lot of pressure to not give away the programme and her involvement in it, so I was very surprised that she tells Matt within a small amount of time. Though Matt and Daisy's relationship is sweet, I didn't find myself overly invested in it emotionally. 

I liked that this book is a standalone novel, because I think YA needs more of those.  I really liked the idea behind Revive but I felt like there could have been more said about this secret programme and I wanted more intensity and emotion between the characters and their relationships.  That aside, I still enjoyed this book and it was a pleasant way to spend a few hours!