Greeting fellow earthlings! It's me, Unicorn. I read this really cool book called The Young Elites by Marie Lu a while back in December, but I thought I should do a book talk on it. I don't want to miss out on doing a book talk on a good book after all. It's a little darker than what I usually read, but it's so good (which totally makes up for the dark stuff)! This has spoilers by the way. There will be a warning before the spoilers though, so don't worry.
The Young Elites is about this world where a decade ago (decade = 10 years), there was a huge deadly blood fever all across the nation. Almost everyone who got it died, but some people survived, and the ones who survived were left with markings. Hair that suddenly turned an abnormal colour, scars, two different coloured eyes, etc. Some of the people with markings have special, dangerous powers. These people are called The Young Elites. The Inquisition Axis wants all of the Young Elites dead. Adelina Amouteru is one of them, but her powers are stronger than everyone thinks. Dun dun dunnn... (I'm sorry for the bad summary. The back of the book is better.)
I don't want to start this off by saying 'I really liked this book' because that sentence is generally frowned upon. So instead I'm going to say: I thoroughly relished this novel. (Thank you, trusty thesaurus.) (I don't know why I'm doing this.) The first thing I noticed, and kept on repeatedly noticing, was the awesome writing style and word choice. The way Marie Lu describes settings is amazing and makes you feel like you're really there, or at least you really really want to be there just because it sounds fantastic. The words used in this book are so beautiful! Secondly, this book has an awesome cover. Just look at it! You can't tell me that isn't epic.
Now, what did I like about the actual story? The multiple perspectives were very cool, although most of it was still told out of Adeline's perspective, and at the beginning they could be a bit confusing. The world setup was well introduced, not too complicated or confusing. Now, the characters, Adelina especially, were very interesting. Adelina isn't your usual, selfless protagonist. She's pretty evil, actually. But when you read the story out of her perspective, you kind of think her actions are justifiable, but you still don't like her for doing the things she does. It's pretty conflicting, because you feel like everything Adelina does is reasonable but terribly mean at the same time. And you can see inside her head and everything, so she explains why she does certain things, but they still aren't okay at all. It was really interesting to read out of the perspective of someone who's far from perfect, because we don't see much of those books these days. The protagonists are always perfect and kind and go out of their way to help others. Adelina is different, but in some ways, she's still a likeable character. Alright, enough of me rambling. I hope this made sense.
(MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD, SKIP THESE TWO PARAGRAPHS IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BOOK) There were a few things I didn't like though. For instance, I was confused about if she liked Rafaelle. I thought she did, but apparently NOPE. I was totally mistaken and Adelina and Rafaelle were just friends. That was a little confusing. I liked Rafaelle better as a character than Enzo, to be honest. We never really got to see that much of Enzo's personality, and Rafaelle was usually nothing but kind to Adelina, so I liked him better as a character. What would their ship name be? Rafalina? Adeelle? Hahaha
And then there was the ending. Oh, that ending. Enzo died. Okay, I can deal with that. That's fine and everything. But the way he died. WHY? And then Rafaelle and the rest of the Dagger Society abandoned Adelina, even though it really wasn't her fault he died. I understand that 'her powers are out of control' but I still didn't agree with what they did to Adelina at the end, and just the overall fact that Enzo died. Now everyone's going to say I just can't deal with book deaths and everything, but I just found the ending overall conflicting and I just didn't feel that the book was very well concluded (although there is a sequel, which I haven't read yet.)
This was mostly just me rambling on about confusing things. Anyway, I would probably give this book 3.5 stars because of the ending, and the fact that the character relationships were slightly confusing.
Somewhere around there. The ending was just not good but not exactly completely bad. (If you skipped the paragraphs with spoilers, you wouldn't have read my opinion about the ending. Sorry!) I don't know how to feel about that ending, to be honest, so I'll just have to wait and see. Hopefully I'll get to reading the sequel soon, after all of the other books I'm currently reading or planning to read. But when I do read it, there will most likely be a book talk on it, no worries!
Leave a comment below telling us what you thought of this book, or if you have any book recommendations for me and Pegasus!
~Unicorn
