Blackout

"Did they just want to watch the world burn?"

2 STARS

I was rooting for this book. I had such high hopes for this book. And I watched as they all crumbled to the ground. I almost put this book down, but I didn't and I stuck through to the end, where I hoped things would finally pick up and start to get going into a truly original direction, but they just...didn't. It was just more and more of the same stuff and there wasn't really a climax to speak of other than getting out of a car and letting police arrest you. This book just wasn't remarkable. If you've ever read Illusive or even The Darkest Mindsthen you know almost exactly what's going to happen here. It was cookie-cutter, the characters didn't really hold my interest except for Laura, but even then I couldn't get past her desire to obliterate almost every other character and thing in the book, and just all around forgettable. Aubrey and Jack annoyed the shit out of me. When we entered into Aubrey's point of view, I was intrigued, hoping this was the strong female I'd been promised in the book. But it turned out that she was a whiny, naive, fall-in-love-at-first-sight kind of girl. Now, I can take some of that, but when it's your main character and her decisions are driving a lot of the book, it's hard to deal with it. Alec was far more interesting. I wanted to know about this terrorism that he sparked, and seemed to be the leader of even at such a young age, and how it all worked, especially with the Lambdas and how they were incorporated into the fold, but we just didn't really get a lot of info and barely got any of his perspective. The plot was boring and any twists Wells tried to instigate were predictable and stilted, and I honestly didn't understand why Alec and Laura were in the camp in the first place, and where Dan went until he magically reappeared at the end of the book. Though the writing was approachable and easy to understand, it wasn't elevated enough to really keep me reading for the sake of the words on the page, which I sometimes resort to when a novel can't keep my attention through the plot and characters alone. I wish this book could have appealed to me more, but it just...didn't. Share your thoughts!