Review: Rogue Touch

Title: Rogue Touch
Author: Christine Woodward
Category/Genre: Romance, Sci-Fi, YA

See it at Goodreads


Twenty-year-old Anna Marie was just fired for the third time--this time from a bakery. Why can't she hold a job? Well, for starters, she dresses . . . differently. She looks like a Goth girl to the extreme, her shock of white hair contrasting with her head-to-toe black garb, her face the only skin she chooses to reveal. But Anna Marie doesn't have a choice. Her skin, her touch, is a deadly weapon that must be concealed. She accidentally put her first boyfriend, Cody, in a coma when they kissed. Horrified, she ran away to Jackson, Mississippi, where she's been living alone in a cramped apartment and scraping by on food stamps.

Then she meets otherworldly James and everything changes. He's just like her--completely alone and also on the run. To elude James's mysterious and dangerous family, the pair takes to the highway. As they cross the country, their simmering attraction intensifies and they both open up about their secretive pasts. James reveals that his true name is Touch and he christens Anna Marie Rogue. But with danger at their heels, they know they can't run forever. Rogue must decide if she'll unleash her devastating powers once again, which she swore never to do, in order to save the only person who seems truly to understand and accept her.

There are some things you may not know about me.

I’m a dork. A big one. I want to go to comic conventions. I want to dress up. The full enchilada. Make-up. Hair. Costume. My favorite character is NOT Superman. (I rather dislike Superman actually). I collect comic books. X-Men to be more exact. :)

Which led to my interest of this book. Rogue Touch. Rogue is one of my favorite female comic characters and I couldn’t help the fascination that bubbled beneath my surface when I heard Marvel was teaming up to put out a novel about her character.

I had a lot of issues though. Mainly, this book read like a giant fan-fiction love-story to me more than anything. Maybe I shouldn’t have went into it with so much enthusiasm, but I did. If you’re expecting to go into Rogue Touch and see the X-Men Universe and many of your favorite mutants, you will not get that. Is this to say that it was a bad read? No, not really. The action sequences were well done and I was kept on the edge of my seat the majority of the read. I did enjoy reading about an early life of Rogue before X-Men, but I didn’t enjoy how her character seemed to be portrayed most of the time as I was reading. For her being one of my favorite comic characters, I almost disliked her A LOT in this book. But mostly, I just disliked the over-abundance of romance, when I just wanted the story… the action.

The descriptions were thorough enough for me to easily visualize everything, making scenes come across as cinematic. I liked that very much. The author gave me enough oomph to power through, even in times of annoyance. So that’s a bonus.

This was an easy and entertaining read. Personally, I would love to see more comic-book characters have novels like this.