ARC Review: Renegades by Marissa Meyer

Title: Renegades Series: Renegades #1 Written by: Marissa Meyer Published: November 7, 2017 by Feiwel and Friends (Macmillan) (Amazon / Goodreads) Synopsis: Secret Identities. Extraordinary Powers. She wants vengeance. He wants justice. The Renegades are a syndicate of prodigies—humans with extraordinary abilities—who emerged from the ruins of a crumbled society and established peace and order where chaos reigned. As champions of justice, they remain a symbol of hope and courage to everyone...except the villains they once overthrew. Nova has a reason to hate the Renegades, and she is on a mission for vengeance. As she gets closer to her target, she meets Adrian, a Renegade boy who believes in justice—and in Nova. But Nova's allegiance is to a villain who has the power to end them both

**** I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This fact has not changed my opinion. ****

This was not my favorite Marissa Meyer book. I’m a fan of the author and I have always thought she has done some amazing a creative things with classic stories so I had high hopes for this book. Unfortunately, I think that I had too high of hopes because I just didn’t love it. It was a good book but it wasn’t as exciting and I wanted and could have been much more creative.

One thing I did like about the book, despite their lack of creativity, was the characters. I’ll talk more about the powers later but as far as basic characterizations go, this part was pretty good. Character creation has always been where Marissa shines. She is great at creating lovable and charming characters that are complex and engaging. And while these weren’t some of her best they were still really good. As far as the main characters go, there were two, Nova and Adrian. I definitely liked them both. They had interesting backstories and were similarly complex in that they weren’t totally bad or totally good. I connected with them both and their search for answers. But many of them were odious and complex and walked the line between good and evil. That is what I like in my superhero/villain stories and also what I like about books in general so I did appreciate that.

But as far as the powers and the world-building goes, they were not very creative. I say they are not very creative because these characters had definite X-Men vibes. Like SUCH X-Men vibes. Which honestly is natural when you’re talking about superheroes because seriously there is a mutant for everything. It when basically every character has a near Pete t correlation with am X-Men character it gets a little old. There were some exceptions. Adrian’s power was really cool. I liked what she did with him a lot. And Monarch who could turn into butterflies was pretty interesting. But in general, I felt like instead of playing with superhero tropes this book played them up. Which is not a bad thing but also not what I am looking for.

But I think that was how I felt about the plot as well, it was not what I was looking for. It’s not that this book is not exciting. Because, come on, it’s a book about super powered people, there are plenty of action scenes. It’s just that the action scenes were kind of few and far between. There was so much potential here, but the book really just didn’t go there. I had all these theories about complex directions that that plot could be taken in and it didn’t do any of them:m. Which, whatever, I didn’t write this story. But the climax just fell flat for me. I didn’t feel like there was much of an over-arching plot that built up as the boom developed even though it tried to do that. It just felt like it was trying to be tense and it succeeded in that but the plot on the whole felt kind of lackluster.

Maybe it just suffered from first book syndrome for me. I am interested to see where the series goes because the big reveal at the ending was amazing and I know there is definitely some shoes to drop but on the whole, this book just didn’t impress me how I hoped it would.

I give Renegades by Marissa Meyer 8 out of 10 stars

Buy/Borrow/Bypass: Borrow. I would probably recommend this book to someone who is not a superhero fan. It’s probably geared more towards a casual fan and not someone who wants an in-depth and creative exploration into the story of heroes and villains.

Have you read Renegades? What did you think? Leave me a comment with your thoughts. Thanks for stopping by and HAPPY READING!