Renegades

I'm going to be honest, here: I really don't feel like writing an extensive review for this book. I have nothing to contribute that I haven't seen in other reviews, both positive and negative, which have been around on this site for longer than I've even had an account. So, instead of a well-articulated, lengthy review, I'm going to provide a brief and far from all-inclusive list of things I liked and disliked.



Things I Loved

* Diversity - The main characters are a black boy and a biracial latina girl. There are a lot of non-white characters, a few differently-abled characters (chief among them a superhero with a bone disease whose power does not alter that he needs a cane to walk), and a few LGBT+ characters (chief among them the leaders of the superhero squad, who are a married interracial gay couple). There are a ton of kickass female characters. I don't think I've ever seen such a diverse cast in this genre before!

* Grey Morality - Are the heroes really heroes? They sure do some fucked up things... Are the villains really villains? A few of them seem to care more about society than the heroes. It feels more like a struggle between villains and villains with hero complexes sometimes, but at others it feels like a struggle between very complex morality issues. I love that.

* Max - Seriously, Max. He is a precious cinnamon bun and should be protected at all costs.

* Adrian - His power is awesome, he's adorably awkward about his crush, and he's very humanized with how he makes terrible mistakes with the best of intentions.

* Action - This book has quite a few action scenes that are actually easy to follow and which create good mental images. I usually struggle to imagine the written action in books, but this made it very easy.

Things I Thought Were “Meh”

* Nova's Inconsistency - Nova's motives and thoughts seemed to shift inconsistently from time to time as the plot demanded.

* Love At First Sight - I don't even dislike the relationship between Adrian and Nova (if you can call it that), but ugh the cliche notion of being drawn to each other from the moment they met despite all the things that come between them... Idk, it's cheesy. But the chemistry exists toward the middle and end of the book, so I forgive the cliche nature of how the connection begins.

* Ingrid - I get what the author intended to do with her characterization, but I just found her kind of stupid and annoying. Not enough to loathe her, but let's just say I often found myself rooting for her demise just so I wouldn't have to deal with her ruining things all the time.

* Cheesy Dialogue - I was able to look past it because it's fairly common in superhero-based fiction, but holy crap the dialogue is ridiculous.

* Unrealistic Ages - By this I mean that the children don't talk like children and the adults feel more like immature teens. At one point, I was shocked to discover that 16-year-old Nova is somehow the youngest person in her group of villains.

Things I Loathed

* Had Had - Seriously. The amount of times “had had” showed up made me want to grab the editor and shake them while crying in misery. There were also several other awkward phrases and repetitive wordings. I didn't care for it, and felt it really dragged the experience down at times.

* Typos - There are so many typos, missing words, extra words, etc. The editor was clearly asleep at the wheel.

* Continuity Errors - I don't have the mental energy to provide many examples, but one thing that comes to mind is the insistence that no prodigy has more than one superpower. But Nova herself has more than one... and is the person being a shocked Pikachu over the mere idea of anyone having multiples. Then they swap it around to say that nobody has more than one unrelated power. Also, Captain Chromium apparently has pure invulnerability... except apparently he can be killed if someone shoots him in the eye with a poison dart?

* Unreliable Narrator, Without A Narrator - I'm aware it's technically not... impossible to pull off this way. But when you have a detached third person narrative that centers on a character but doesn't present itself as being told by them - and the narration swaps POV characters between chapters - I don't appreciate making use of the unreliable narrator trope. Actually, I just hate that trope in general as well, but it felt truly egregious here. The way it was handled in this book felt like being outright lied to in order to make the author feel clever with a reveal that would only have worked in a movie that didn't dive into inner thoughts of characters which contradicted the ultimate reveal.

* The Ending - Thanks, I hate it. That's all I feel like saying. It ties into the above, but I hate it enough to mention it twice.

Overall, though, I found myself ignoring the flaws and just enjoying the ride. I'm a sucker for X-Men-esque stories and I love tales of grey morality where the heroes aren't as heroic as they should be and the villains don't seem all that bad. Anti-heroes are my jam! I love books that focus on characters, and I really don't mind a bit of cheese in my superhero/mutant type tales. So despite not being technically perfect and despite the ending kinda pissing me off, this book earned a spot on my favourites shelf.

I had fun, and that's what counts.

This book was better than I was expecting. Marissa Meyer sometimes struggles when it comes to introducing characters and worlds. Cinder is nothing like the rest of that series and Heartless is a weak book overall, but I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to jump right into this world and these characters lives. Now that being said the so called “twist” at the end could be seen coming a mile away. I predicted it in the first 100 pages or so. But I'm totally here for the couple from opposite sides falling for each other. I'm interested to see how this one is tied up in the second book since this is supposed to be a duology.