#also powerless was marketed as a book for fans of red queen

[therubyreader]

Booktok people scare me because what do you mean they’re telling Victoria Aveyard, the author of Red Queen, that she ripped off Powerless, a book that was published 8 years after hers???

[therubyreader]

My Review of Powerless by Lauren Roberts

See a full list of my book reviews here

*Disclaimer: there will be spoilers later on in the review*

Review Word Count, non-spoiler: 875 Review Word Count Total: 1,553

Hello everyone! It’s my first review of 2024! I have once again fallen victim to the influence of BookTok and read Powerless by Lauren Roberts, after not being able to escape it being recommended to me by essentially everyone and their mother. And this time they’re onto something, they have not disappointed me with this one. 

Powerless follows Paedyn Gray, an Ordinary, someone without any powers in a society where being Ordinary is a crime punishable by death, surviving the slums of Ilya by pretending to be a Psychic and stealing to stay alive. One day she unknowingly saves one of the princes and is forced to participate in the Purging Trials, a brutal competition to showcase the powers of the Elite, powers she doesn’t have, while managing to not get caught lest she be killed when they find out what she really is.  

Let’s get a couple of things out of the way, first this book is marketed as an enemies to lovers story, which it isn’t. Paedyn and her love interest, Kai (because of course his name is Kai) are rivals in the Trails by circumstance, but like they both take a liking to each other immediately. I saw someone call it insta-love which, sure, but I wouldn’t go that far per se, but there isn’t really an “enemies” thing, Paedyn just dances around the fact she likes Kai for most of the book and this dude is smitten almost immediately. So, sorry to disappoint you all with that one. There is romantic chemistry pretty immediately, but they do have some fist fights and hold knives to each other’s throats also so if you’re into that, wink wonk.  

Second, this book is marketed as a mixture of Red Queen and The Hunger Games, which like, I guess. The comparison to The Hunger Games isn’t completely accurate, I mean there are games that can result in death but people dying isn’t a requirement, there are people who participate in the Trials and lose but also stay alive. The comparison to Red Queen though, is very on the nose, if you liked Red Queen and wanted to read a world with a near identical magic system and a very similar plot progression, this is the book for you. I’m saying this as a fan of Red Queen, it is one of my favorite series of all time, but there were a lot of mirrors between it and Powerless, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is something you should be aware of.  

I think my biggest complaint with this book was how the magic system wasn’t really explained in depth, there were different classifications between the different types of powers, each had its own cute little name like they do in Red Queen. People with super strength are called Brawnies, or teleporters are called Blinks, or those who can control plants are Blooms (just off the top of my head). While we are told that the plague is what gave certain people cool abilities and fancy hair colors, we don’t really know much else. At least in Red Queen we know that people inherit their father’s power, but in Powerless they don’t seem to have any rhyme or reason. For example, Kitt has a dual ability, cool, why? He’s the only person we know of that has two abilities and everyone is very chill about this though it is out of the norm and never explained. Kai is a Wielder, meaning he can use anyone’s ability if they’re in range, which is mildly related to Kitt’s ability if you think really hard about it and it makes sense since they’re brothers, but their dad is Brawny? You’ve lost me there. Also, what made certain people have abilities and others be Ordinary, why are Ordinaries still being born, like how does that work genetically if both their parents have abilities. I don’t know, maybe it’s just a me thing where I’m thinking too hard about it, but I do honestly hope that the rest of the series goes into this a bit more since I crave answers. This was probably done on purpose, and we’ll get Ordinary lore further down the line and lore about abilities as a whole, which is a selling point to get you to keep reading, but I would’ve appreciated a small bit of lore as I read. I shouldn’t have had this many questions about the magic system while reading since it did pull me away from the story a bit.  

I did enjoy the book despite my mild complaints, the story was entertaining enough for me to keep me reading even though I could essentially predict what was going to happen next since it follows a very basic YA plot progression and the characters were, mostly, fun to read about. Honestly, for a debut book, it was fairly well written, and I don’t have very many complaints on the writing style outside of the typical cliches, but I’m reading a YA book so I cannot complain. Overall, it was very enjoyable, though nothing groundbreaking, and I plan on reading the sequel when it comes out later this year, I give it an honestly pretty decent entertainment out of ten.  

Spoilers!!  

Normally I start the spoiler part of my review talking about something negative, but I have decided, new year new me, for now, and I’ll talk about something that I liked. I did enjoy the emphasis on the eye colors, which at first is super annoying because you’re like “omg can they stop talking about each other’s eyes we get it” but as the book goes on the eye color becomes super important. When Kai first meets Paedyn, he’s fascinated by how blue her eyes are and she always talks in detail about his gray eyes, while when she meets Kitt she can’t look him in the eyes since he has his father’s green eyes and Paedyn’s father was killed by the king so she sees the eyes of a killer whenever she looks at Kitt. As the story goes on, Paedyn is able to look Kitt in the eyes and starts to see them as his eyes, not his father’s cruel eyes and slowly starts to associate the green eyes with Kitt and not her father’s killer. But then right at the end we learn that it wasn’t actually the king who killed Paedyn’s dad, but Kai, and Paedyn’s dad was the first person he ever killed. So then the whole thing is flipped on its head! Paedyn realizes she had been hallucinating the king killing her dad (which like I get the trauma, but she was too weird about the green eye thing for me to just pretend she had never seen the king before but I’m not going to worry about it) when it was actually Kai. She had spent the whole book lovingly staring into the eyes of her father’s killer, and we find out in Kai’s bonus chapter that he took note of Paedyn’s dad’s blue eyes as he killed him and then was practically writing poems about Paedyn’s eyes. And then Kitt is for sure there.  

Speaking of Kitt, I’m excited to see him enter his villain era, though poor guy just doesn’t know what’s going on which is honestly a type of villain that is underrated. Unlike Red Queen where you could tell pretty immediately that the goal the entire time was to get rid of the monarchy, it’s a bit more ambiguous in Powerless because Kitt is genuinely a nice guy who wants to do better but unfortunately his dad was assassinated and he’s a little confused. There is honestly a lot of room for his character to develop and I think that’s what I’m most looking forward to in the next one. 

I do have to complain though, because this is who I am as a person. The thing that annoyed me the most was the love triangle (which if this isn’t your first time here you know about my hatred for love triangles) but this one specifically since it’s between two brothers, which is just icky. To paraphrase myself in one of my Goodreads updates (shameless plug) if I had a nickel for every time I read a book where a love triangle involves a pair of half-brothers, I’d have three nickels which isn’t a lot but I’m a little annoyed it’s happened three times. I honestly cannot put my finger on as to why I hate it so much, maybe because it has an incest-y vibe about it, but I just do not like it Sam I am.  

Not to keep word vomiting, I will stop there, but I am honestly willing to talk more about Powerless if you jump into my asks, I did very much enjoy the book despite all my complaining. I could also go into a whole thing where I compare it to Red Queen if anyone asks me nicely because I do have thoughts about that, but this is not the space for it. I cannot wait for Reckless and am very excited to see where the story takes us next!