Review: Renegades

Renegades by Marissa Meyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I AM HERE FOR THE SUPERHEROES AND ALSO THE VILLAINS BECAUSE I AM AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY READER.

Basically, heroes and villains causing chaos and wreaking havoc with chases and explosions and nifty gadgets will always have me lining up for a front row seat.

Admittedly, the start was a little slow. Nova needs her origin story so it took its time getting into the fun, reluctant teamwork stuff, but thankfully we get the view split between her and Adrian so that helped stave off boredom. Plus. Nova is pretty badass so I was digging that.

I did enjoy how hellbent on taking down the good guys Nova was - to start with. Eventually, that got a little tiresome, and I was so frustrated that, even though she was seeing this new side to them, she was still obsessed with revenge. She just shoved everybody into categories instead of taking them each on their own merits and that kinda blindness bugs me so much. She didn't quite develop as much as I hoped she would.

That being said, there are a lot of asshole characters in this book so I kinda can't blame her too much? But, duh, Ingrid is quite clearly psychotic so you really need to let that friendship go, girl.

Adrian was fun, because he was exactly what he should be for a wannabe hero. He likes to save people, but he also wants to make the world a better place. His blind faith kinda balances Nova's blind hatred so together they work really well. I'm expecting some serious angst in the next book from this pair, though. They have some conflicting personal issues that they really need to work through, I feel.

Support characters were fun and hooray for awesome weird unique super powers like bees and butterflies and poison. I mean, some of the origin stories were pretty terrible but hey, whatever. I'm happy to roll with it.

I feel like this book has a lot of political subtext about the need for heroes and society relying on other people to save it etc. so that was kind of fun but it's not necessary to overthink it. It just creates some interesting dynamics in the story, makes it very grey instead of black and white which was quite entertaining.

There's also great diversity with the characters, with some being rather easy to get attached to. I'm really looking forward to getting to know a bit more about these characters in the next one.

The pace is a little uneven, with some parts slower going than others, but overall this had enough action to keep me entertained. There are plenty of cliches and stereotypes but this book cleverly uses them against themselves to carve out a really unique story. I appreciated that.

Overall, it wasn't as hectic as I was hoping for but it was still a really fun action story with some great characters. Can't wait to read the next one!

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