Early Review: Don't Turn Around (PERSEFoNE Trilogy, #1)

Author: Michelle Gagnon
Publication date: August 28th 2012
Publisher: HarperCollins
Hardcover, 310 pages
My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Noa has spent almost her entire life in the system, changing foster parents far too often. Along the way, she became extremely good with computers and she somehow managed to create a false foster family for herself, make a lot of money online under the name of her non-existent foster father and rent a great apartmen. But because of her lack of personal connections, she is targeted by a group that performs illegal medical experiments on human subject. At the beginning of Don’t Turn Around, she wakes up in a warehouse on an operating table with a huge scar on her chest and with absolutely no recollection of how she got there. She somehow manages to run, but she is cut off from her money and her things, and she has nowhere to go.
Peter’s parents are obscenely rich, but ever since his brother died from a rare disease, he might as well be an orphan. His year older girlfriend just started college and is drifting away and he’s not really interested in anything but the website he created for his group of hacktivists. One day, while going through his father’s files, he stumbles upon a URL and when he tries to access it, armed men storm into his house, threaten him and take away his laptop. Completely terrified, but still curious, Peter turns to the best hacker from his site, which happens to be Noa. Pretty soon it becomes clear that their goal is the same, but that doesn’t mean they instantly trust each other.


Don’t Turn Around is an action-packed adventure that leaves you no time to relax, blink or even breathe. Before I started reading, I was curious about the title, but it soon became very clear. The main characters are being chased from one place to the next throughout the book and turning around to look at their pursuers is rarely a good idea. Although separately, both Noa and Peter are on the run the entire time, always trying to find somewhere safe to huddle with a laptop and learn more about the people hunting them. Since they’re both on their own, running, hiding and fighting back using minimal resources, the book has very little dialogue, but it is very fast-paced. The rapid pacing was exhilarating at first, but it soon became exhausting - it left me a bit dizzy and actually physically tired.

Fans of romance will be heavily disappointed. Dual perspective has been growing in popularity, especially in YA, and in most cases it means that the two main characters will eventually fall in love, sometimes very early in the story, sometimes a bit later. Noa and Peter don’t even meet properly until the second half, and even then there’s a lot of distrust between them, so there’s really no real romance to speak of. Peter is heartbroken and Noa is, for the most part, just broken, and even though they’re occasionally attracted to each other, that’s as far as it goes. Personally, I didn’t mind that one bit, but I know there will be a lot of frustrated readers out there.

If you’re expecting any kind of closure from this book, you will be disappointed. The ending is not exactly a cliffhanger, but nothing is resolved either. At one (pretty random) point, the story just stops. Nevertheless, I have no intention of reading the sequel, I just didn't develop any emotional attachments to these characters.