Rogue: Untouched is well worth reading.

X-Men fans will love it because it’s true to the lore, the characters are written excellently, and it’s more X-Men content.

Furthermore, there are a host of nods to X-Men comics, including the references to the characters’ classic costumes (Remy’s trench coat and Rogue’s green & yellow suit – just to name a couple!)

It’s worth mentioning that the book is non-canon but to be fair, the so-called X-Men canon is all over the place anyway. Still, Rogue: Untouched is a great novel and worthy of any entry in the X-Men universe.

Without prior knowledge of X-Men, it’s still a very good novel. The characters are well drawn (well, Remy and Anna Marie are), and makes for a decent origin story. If you enjoy character-driven YA novels, Rogue: Untouched should appeal – regardless of your experience with X-Men.

Rogue: Untouched, written by Alisa Kwitney, is the latest Marvel Aconyte novel (be sure to also check out Domino and Elsa Bloodstone's books!), and it follows one of my favorite heroes from the X-Men franchise.

Rogue is pretty used to having a less-than-ideal life. She lives alone, in a crummy cabin, and makes the best of both it and her job as a waitress. That might have been the only life she ever knew, if not for a few strange appearances in town.

Now, suddenly Rogue is wrapped up in a dangerous world, one that looks to take advantage of and alter mutants. Rogue is going to be forced to come to terms with the truth about herself if she wants to have any chance of surviving what is about to come.

“I'm a ticker off Southern woman, hoss. Cross me and I'll shruck your rocky mountain oysters and stuff them down your throat.”

Rogue: Untouched was such a blast to read, and I sincerely think that any fan of the character will enjoy this take on her world. To be clear, this is not the same Rogue from the comics or the movies. Yes, the foundational elements are all there, but the experiences are different. So if you're looking for a comic/movie adaptation, this isn't it.

There are a lot of fun twists and turns in this novel, many of which cover the basic elements of Rogue's backstory. The not-so-great childhood, the appearance of her powers (which she didn't really know or understand, especially at first), and then a trainwreck situation that pulls her into the world of mutants.

There's a lot to take in here, especially for newer fans. But I think that Alisa Kwitney did an excellent job of making her story approachable here, as well as making a point of having a few different elements thrown into the mix.

It was a fun and quick read, and I'm happy that I took the time to read it. I don't know if this will be the end of Rogue's story as far as these novels are concerned, but I certainly wouldn't mind seeing where the story goes from here. There's so much potential (obviously).

I. Love. Marvel. Anything Marvel. The Avengers, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four. When I got approved for this book, I was ecstatic! While Nightcrawler is my favorite mutant, I enjoyed reading about Rogue too. This is great for any X-Men or just a Marvel fan in general.

This was a new take on Rogue's backstory which kept the main parts in my view but differed from the movies, comics and animated cartoon series. I liked it overall and it was well written but I just felt the plot got a little lost especially towards the end. But it was a good start to a new spin off series for our X Men characters.

A new origin story for Rogue that differs from the comics, the movies, and the 90's X-Men cartoon. But that's the great thing about comics, they are always open to new interpretations.

Anna Marie is a young, down on her luck waitress struggling to get by, until one day a certain, smooth Cajun sits down at one of her tables. Together, they eventually discover she's a mutant and the cause of some of her problems, particularly with her high school beau, Cody. That's when someone comes looking for Gambit things get real rough for the both of them.

Alisa Kwitney was a good choice as writer. She used to be an editor for DC/Vertigo and has written both comics and prose novels. She's well familiar with the X-men's history and delivered a good new version of Rogue's history. The story was entertaining with enough action to keep you interested.

I really enjoy these types of origin stories and this was so great. The characters are well written and I particularly enjoyed how the story revealed their powers and identities. The setting was used well and really helped show Rouge’s background and how her powers had been suppressed for so long. Her personal journey of self discovery and learning how to use her powers was inspiring and also just really cool in a way that reminded of the cartoons that made me first interested in these characters. There was a good balance between having a fresh version of the story and keeping true to what fans love about these characters. All around I enjoyed this book and want to see where the journey continues. The plot ends at a great natural feeling stopping point but it’s still clearly just the beginning.

I really really love Rogue and I was THRILLED to see her getting recognition and notice in media (other than the rogue cut of that movie - we won't talk about that, it was pointless).

Rogue: Untouched follows a younger Anna Marie who is in hiding following an incident - she is not yet aware of her mutant powers when we meet her, she happens upon a stranger named Remy who helps her somewhat to understand her powers - in somewhat of a fight or flight way.

I am hyper critical of all comic inspired media but I really did enjoy Rogue: Untouched. Providing a unique take on Rogue's story it is action packed and provided and allowed for her to significantly grow as a character. Definitely recommend it for any Marvel fan of course, but additionally any comic fan would find joy in this well thought out and executed story.

If there’s anyone that adored watching the original X-Men animated series or the older X-Men films, then you will have discovered the incredible Anna Marie LeBeau aka Rogue! She was always such a sassy lady but her life was super sad too! The fact that she was always too scared to touch anyone or kiss them.

As you can guess from the plot, Rogue Untouched is basically a prequel to everything that we know about Rogue. She’s a teenager in a quiet Mississippi town, trying to make ends meet through her waitress job and praying that her 1986 pickup truck (called Willie) starts! She never would have guessed who would turn up in her life!

If you know the whole X-Men story, then you will probably have already guessed who the ‘handsome card shark’ is! Let’s just say that he’s just as suave and a magnet for trouble as he always has been! We get to see a whole bunch of people that we recognise and some new faces that we meet along the way. Marie’s journey to the lady we know is bumpy, deadly and chaotic but I loved it!! You never knew what was going to happen next and it definitely left me wanting to re-read it all over again.

If you love Marvel and X-Men, you need to read this!

Rogue discovers her powers by chance when she meets the dashing Remy. But when they find themselves captured by a mutant slave trade, she decides to hide her gift in order to find a way out for them. This is a fun and exciting new origin story for Rogue. It’s not an X-Men book, but fans will recognize several well-known characters from the comics. The story builds a slow burn with drama building to an exciting, power-packed show-down. With a thrilling plot with plenty of suspense and mystery, I thoroughly enjoyed this fantastic, original Rogue novel.

This Marvel story is from a new publisher with several new and upcoming titles about familiar and some lesser known characters in the Marvel library. I can’t wait to read them all.

Rogue is one of my favourite mutants from the world of x-men, and I was obsessed with this book when I got into it. I remember watching the X-men animated show when I was younger, and it was so interesting. It didn't shy away from serious topics, so this origin story of Rogue gave me a lot of nostalgia.

My critics are that this was just an origin story for how she realized she was a mutant; I wanted more about her childhood and growing up. I know that this isn't really necessary, but I would have loved that as I adore this character.

Unfortunately this didn't work out for me. I started but then the download got archived before I could finish.

As someone who had Rogue as one of the many lesbian awakenings, I really wanted to read this book. It does add another perspective on the character, not 100% faithful to canon, which I definitely enjoyed, as... well, as a fanfic writer myself. But I guess I started this book with expectations that were too high, because I didn't like it as much as I thought I would.

Rogue: Untouched is Aconyte’s latest X-Men tale, a new instalment in their Marvel Heroines series, by Alisa Kwitney. Untouched is a re-imaging of young Anna Marie for the Instagram generation, which (at least if you’re as old as I am) is … really odd.

For those not familiar with her, Rogue first appeared in the X-Men comics in 1981, already a fully-fledged mutant, who had fallen in with a bad crowd, thanks to the influence of her foster-mother Raven, aka Mystique. Whilst the 2000 X-Men Film portrayed her as young (Anna Paquin was 18 at the time iirc) my exposure to her had always been as an adult who was painfully aware of her powers, even if not particularly able to control them.

At the start of Untouched we are introduced to a teenage Anna Marie, who has already had the formative incident where she accidentally hospitalised her first boyfriend by inadvertently absorbing his life-force when they kissed. However, she somehow remains oblivious of the fact that she is a mutant, even lamenting how nice it would be to have powers like the mutants she follows on Instagram. Yes, Instagram.

For me, this felt extremely strange. Aconyte’s Earth-618 setting does have divergences from the main 616 continuum, but this is the biggest difference I’d come across: a character who has been an adult X-Man since (just) before I was born, suddenly retconned back to her youth. The interwebs tell this old codger than Instagram has been around since 2010, so maybe the novel’s opening is meant to be set a few years ago, but it felt strange to have a ‘classic’ X-Men character in such a jarringly modern setting without some kind of explicit disturbance to put them there (something like the All-New X-Men series which made a big deal of having the original 5 time-travel to the future and feel thoroughly disorientated by the whole experience). It’s not badly written, and if you’re not overly familiar with the character, you probably wouldn’t have noticed it at all, but I found it took me a long time to get my head around.


Untouched gradually amasses a very large cast for a relatively short book, and one of the first new arrivals in young Anna’s small-town life is a dashing young Cajun: big personality, honest thief, irrepressible rogue, reckless gambler and incorrigible flirt Remy. It wouldn’t be a proper Rogue story without Gambit, and I think there would have been a lot of disappointed readers if a fair amount of ink hadn’t been spilled on the chemistry between them. That said, there were definitely points in the first half of the novel where the story felt a bit YA/Romance-y for my taste (aside from plenty of experience in the world of comics, Kwitney does appear to be a Romance writer by trade, so it was no huge surprise if her style didn’t entirely suit my preferences) and I was glad when the action started to really kick in a little later on.

Aside from Anna and the suspicious travelling Cajun, there are plenty of other factions playing a role in the story of Untouched. When Irene and clearly-a-pseudonym “Lucretia Borger” turned up at the diner, I missed the obvious clues, and was kicking myself when Anna first goes to visit them at their place of residence and (at least for anyone with any kind of background knowledge), it becomes very obvious who you’re dealing with – I won’t say more, just in case anyone is feeling as unobservant as I was that week!

By the time you get to the end of Untouched, you’ll have been introduced to a whole host of X-Men-related characters. There’s a significant strand of what are essentially Gambit supporting characters, as well as some general deep-cuts from the mutant side of the Marvel Universe – Spiral is a fairly big name, despite being a bit out-of-place in Mississippi, but Nature Girl and Zeitgeist are pretty obscure, whilst I’m convinced that the last 2 who pitch up with them are new creations.

There are also numerous contenders to be the villain of the piece, most of them existing comic-characters, albeit tweaked and re-worked for Untouched. None were figures that I was hugely familiar with, but the constantly evolving dynamic between them felt very interesting, as little antagonists found themselves outclassed by other adversaries of a completely different order of power.

In the centre of it all, of course, remains Anna Marie, by the end of the book “Rogue” herself. I’m singularly poorly placed to comment on how accurate a portrayal of a teenage girl this is, but I thought that Kwitney did a great job of capturing the uncertainty and, indeed, the sheer peril of Rogue’s reality, constantly absorbing memories, abilities, and even personality traits of those she touches. Besides that fear of remaining ‘untouched’ the chameleon nature of her powers can leave her questioning just what her inner core is – indeed to what extent she really exists independently of those she is able to drain and/or mimic. It’s through the lens of these questions that Untouched is constantly exploring broader themes of trust and to what extent characters really know each other, grounding the outlandish comic-book events in some very human questions of personality and society.

As mentioned at the start, people familiar with Rogue’s comic-book origins will know that she was originally part of the Brotherhood of Mutants, but defected to the good guys, joining the X-Men later. Untouched introduces us to a version of some of these Brotherhood characters, clearly at a very early stage in their own mutant journeys. Whilst the size of the book’s overall cast means that they’re never going to be getting a huge amount of page time, I thought that the brief insights that we do get did a really good job of offering some insight into “Fred” and “Sinjin” [sic] that are often not really touched on. There’s never any attempt to label these new acquaintances as heroes or villains, simply new teammates, learning to trust each other in pursuit of a common goal, just as you might expect for an origins story set entirely within the confines of Xavier’s school.

Overall, I thought that Untouched was an interesting read. It certainly wasn’t my favourite X-Men title from Aconyte so far, and it definitely strays a bit too far towards romance for my tastes (possibly inevitable when you’re introducing Rogue and Gambit and their perennial inability to properly be together), but it’s still a well-put-together book with an interesting plot that offers a few twists and turns along the way to developing some thought-provoking character relationships. I think the portrayal of the Brotherhood was definitely my favourite aspect of the book, and would still recommend it to anyone with an interest in Rogue as a character, or superhero origin-stories more generally.

Personally I just couldn't get into this book. I tried I really tried but the story just wouldn't keep my attention.

I feel sad because I was so excited about this one.

Rogue Untounched features a young Rogue, Anna Marie, who is living alone and hiding from everyone because of an incident involving her ex-boyfriend. Marie is unaware of her mutant powers until she meets a stranger, Remy, in need of a place to crash. Remy brings trouble with him as he and Marie are kidnapped. Slowly Marie learns more about her mutant power. Can this power help her escape?

I was very excited to get a copy of Rogue Untouched. As a fan of the X-Men movies and basically anything Marvel-related, I was curious to read this take on Rogue's backstory. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Alisa Kwitney writes an entertaining and action-packed story. I very much enjoyed this backstory for Rogue and her character development was great. I loved all the side characters and the various cameo's by X-men characters was a great addition.

Highly recommend this one to any Marvel and X-men fan!

I truly am enjoying how creative the Marvel Heroines series has been! I love the way that we get in Rogue's head. I am glad that we got to get the feel of her journey and self-discovery. Plus, seeing her powers at work.

A Marvel Heroines novel

I received an advance reader copy of this book from the publisher via Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

Rogue is one of the most powerful members of the X-Men, but also the one whose powers are hardest to understand. This book helps ease some of that confusion, as it begins just prior to her powers emerging and shows readers the process of experimentation and training she went through to help define and strengthen those powers.


I was glad to find that the book also includes the character Gambit, Rogue’s love interest from the 1990s X-Men animated series. Their chemistry was always off the charts (even though Rogue can’t kiss or even hold hands without sapping energy from whoever she touches), and she and Gambit had that same type of chemistry here. It also includes several other mutant characters, some who I’d heard of and some who I hadn’t.

I gave Rogue: Untouched five stars. I thought it could have been even better if it were faster paced and had more action, but it’s a very enjoyable book just as it is.

Anyone who has seen the first X-men film will be aware of Rogue's backstory to an extent - an unfortunate teenage snog leaving a boy in a coma and resulting in her spending all her time isolated from touching others and spending her allowance on gloves.

In that film, Rogue is played by the wonderful Anna Paquin, who also starred as Sookie Stackhouse in True Blood. It both helped and confused me that in this book Rogue is waiting tables in a smalltown diner, blurring the lines between Rogue and Sookie for me. I kept expecting a vampire to walk through the diner doors. Instead, we are treated to the superb cajun Gambit, my favourite character from the early 90s cartoon series. He helps Rogue (Anna Marie) to discover that she has some mutant powers and how they could be used.

At the same time, Rogue meets two mysterious ladies who are seeking new students for their academy and encourage her to take a chance and give up her waiting career.

Rogue then finds herself embroiled in Gambit's past exploits with a mutant slave trader and has to quickly learn to use her powers (and those of the mutants around her) to escape their capture.

The book flows well, with plenty of character development for Rogue and a satisfying cast of familiar and new (to me at least!) mutants along the way - including one late reveal that I'm sure all readers will see coming a mile off.

While the book never dragged and the pace was great, I did struggle to get through this book as quickly as I had hoped. This is more down to things going on outwith my reading schedule (stupidly listening to 500 albums, marking professional exams and the kids' school holidays). However, while I can't quite put my finger on anything specific, the book didn't quite drag me back in for a sneaky 10 minutes during the day.

I did enjoy this book, as with some of the other Marvel novels issued recently, and would recommend it to anyone looking for something a bit super-hero-y but in a novel.

I received a free advance copy of this book from the publishers and netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is NOT a graphic novel, but a novelization of the early life of Rogue, before she joined the X-Men. The writing style reminded me of a PG version of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series. This is a first person narrative with another snarky, fun loving southern woman.

As an X-Men fan, I did not learn anything new about these Marvel characters. However, I enjoyed the change of format, because it offered a different means in delivering a story. Instead of illustrations I allowed my mind to create the colorful scenes conveyed only through the words. As I read Rogue's inner thoughts I heard the voice from the 1992 tv series. I enjoyed making a game of guessing who new characters were based on my prior comic book knowledge.

Suitable for comic book fans and people new to the genre. I look forward to future books.

Alisa Kwitney's Rogue: Untouched was a fantastic dive into one of my favorite Marvel characters. I loved her take on Rogue's character, especially when she was coming to terms with her powers. And Remy's introduction had me squealing. When I started, I couldn't put it down until I finished. The only downside was the writing style which was not exactly my cup of tea. There were a few references (I'm guessing they were added in to make Rogue a relatable teen) that made me cringe, but not enough to be annoying. Overall, this was a delightful read that I highly recommend it!