Gypsy by Trisha Leigh

Synopsis: Inconsequential: not important or significant.
Synonyms: insignificant, unimportant, nonessential, irrelevant
In the world of genetic mutation, Gypsy’s talent of knowing a person’s age of death is considered a failure. Her peers, the other Cavies, have powers that range from curdling a blood still in the vein to being able to overhear a conversation taking place three miles away, but when they’re taken from the sanctuary where they grew up and forced into the real world, Gypsy, with her all-but-invisible gift, is the one with the advantage.
The only one who’s safe, if the world finds out what they can do.
When the Cavies are attacked and inoculated with an unidentified virus, that illusion is shattered. Whatever was attached to the virus causes their abilities to change. Grow. In some cases, to escape their control.
Gypsy dreamed of normal high school, normal friends, a normal life, for years. Instead, the Cavies are sucked under a sea of government intrigue, weaponized genetic mutation, and crushing secrets that will reframe everything they’ve ever been told about how their “talents” came to be in the first place.
When they find out one of their own has been appropriated by the government, mistreated and forced to run dangerous missions, their desire for information becomes a pressing need. With only a series of guesses about their origins, the path to the truth becomes quickly littered with friends, enemies, and in the end, the Cavies ability to trust anyone at all.

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Find it on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22065331-gypsy

5 stars

This book seems to be many layed and internally based. There’s not a lot of action in the beginning.  It’s very spy novelly.  Like subterfuge.  I kinda dig the main character Gypsy, she has an emotional maturity about her that’s above and beyond what a normal teenager would have.  I attribute that to her lack of social interaction and outside influences from growing up on Darley.  The closeness they all share is admirable given their circumstances.  It really stuck out for me in this book. No matter what obstacles they faced they were still together.  I have friends like that so I can relate to it and identify with it.

Gypsy seems to have the one power that’s least useful, everybody else has the ability to harm or defend themselves. But gypsy’s power isn’t defensive or offensive, which she struggles with because she feels as though she isn’t contributing to the group as a whole.

I had a hard time liking Jude. I think he is a cookie cutter boy who doesn’t have as many layers as Gypsy and doesn’t fit in with how her personality is.  He seems to be really completely normal, where as Dane has something special about him that they have in common and they can relate to and bond over.  I like him more.  I like Mole too but I feel like Mole’s attraction to Gypsy is more due to proximity than to true attraction.  They are very close. I don’t even know if it’s a physical attraction but almost as if he doesn’t want to be replaced, like he feels threatened as her best friend that others can see the awesomeness that Gypsy has.

She juggles with being two people, Gypsy and Norah.  Fitting in with her new friends once she is rescued and remaining faithful to her old friends that she grew up with and are so close too.  This is an interesting internal conflict to me.  How do you reconcile growing as a person and branching out but also remaining faithful to your past?

Favorite quote:

The words gather in the air, surround my feet, and settle next to me on the bed, a steaming stew of letters and sentences.  I’m afraid if I slurp them all down they’ll never rearrange into the proper order, never make sense, so I sit among my own story, afraid to touch. Afraid to move.