oysterkatcher 's review for:

The Young Elites by Marie Lu

3.0

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Let me preface this before I begin--I chose this book PURELY because of the awful tropes the summary presents, and decided it would suffer the fate of many other YA novels that come across our (being me and my roommates) critical gaze.
There were a couple of surprises that I really liked about this book, those being Rafaelle,

Spoiler

Enzo's murder

, and

Spoiler

Violetta's powers

. Otherwise, however, it suffered from a litany of terrible young adult tropes, mainly the Mary Sue protagonist and the obvious love triangle set up. While the love triangle may not have fallen into place as stereotypically as any ol' generic YA novel, it was there nonetheless and it was a stupid plot device. I also regretted the absence of character development in any of the characters. They stayed the exact same, maybe with a few character changes but not enough for the length of time that the novel presents. Also, I really liked some of the side characters (GEMMA) and they never passed a surface layer of character.