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stormydawnc 's review for:
The Young Elites
by Marie Lu
The Young Elites is a fast-paced YA high fantasy that both plays with a lot of recognizable fantasy standards and also often subverts them. Unlike many fantasy heroines, Adelina doesn’t start off as an uncertain main character who learns a little along the way and grows into self-confidence. While Adelina learns and grows, as all good main characters should, her character growth breaks outside the norm.
See, Adelina is a dark and tortured character from the beginning, but unlike many, she knows it. She might still have some learning to do about her powers and how they manifest and what she’s capable of, but from a personality standpoint, she knows exactly who she is. Adelina is cunning and cut-throat, and she’s not about to let anything stand in her way–which is not to say she’s completely closed off to others. While Adelina is guarded, she will sometimes let other people in. She cares deeply about her sister and that plays out in the story over and over again, but Adelina has no qualms about who she is. She’s not a nice person, and she knows it, and I kind of love her for it.
I also really thought The Young Elites was well-paced and well-plotted. It was a little confusing to be thrown into the world at first, but Lu did a good job of introducing the reader and not relying on info-dumps for the most part(though I did feel like there was a little of this at the beginning). It doesn’t take long for Adelina to learn she is a Young Elite and what she can do–the whole self-discovery part of the plot happens extremely quickly in this one, and it works. It leaves more time for scheming and blackmail and growth.
At first the world in The Young Elites seems rather simple. There’s a blood fever, and it can have side effects of oh yeah, giving children who survive it, often with physical disfigurations, special powers. I was willing to go with this premise, though I had questions. Over time, however, Lu really builds up the world around Adelina and shows that this is a complex world filled with complex characters.
There are a few other characters that The Young Elites closely follows. I’m not going to get too much into talking about them specifically, but I wanted to point out that for characters who sometimes don’t get much page time, they’re remarkably well-developed. A few of them do get some significant chunks of the text, but I was still amazed at just how real they felt and how soon.
However, those characters also lead to my only real complaint with The Young Elites. Adelina’s chapters are told in first person, but then the story sometimes cuts to another character–and sections are all done in third person. This sort of point of view device was really irritating as a reader, because every single time there was a character jump it completely jarred me out of the story, and it felt like a way around having to really differ two character’s narrative voices. I would have much preferred it all be in first person or third person, and stay limited to that narration the entire time. It felt shocking to suddenly be pulled out of a first person perspective and into a third person perspective, and then back again. While the story of The Young Elites was excellent, this style of story-telling really hindered my complete enjoyment.
This review first appeared Book.Blog.Bake.
See, Adelina is a dark and tortured character from the beginning, but unlike many, she knows it. She might still have some learning to do about her powers and how they manifest and what she’s capable of, but from a personality standpoint, she knows exactly who she is. Adelina is cunning and cut-throat, and she’s not about to let anything stand in her way–which is not to say she’s completely closed off to others. While Adelina is guarded, she will sometimes let other people in. She cares deeply about her sister and that plays out in the story over and over again, but Adelina has no qualms about who she is. She’s not a nice person, and she knows it, and I kind of love her for it.
I also really thought The Young Elites was well-paced and well-plotted. It was a little confusing to be thrown into the world at first, but Lu did a good job of introducing the reader and not relying on info-dumps for the most part(though I did feel like there was a little of this at the beginning). It doesn’t take long for Adelina to learn she is a Young Elite and what she can do–the whole self-discovery part of the plot happens extremely quickly in this one, and it works. It leaves more time for scheming and blackmail and growth.
At first the world in The Young Elites seems rather simple. There’s a blood fever, and it can have side effects of oh yeah, giving children who survive it, often with physical disfigurations, special powers. I was willing to go with this premise, though I had questions. Over time, however, Lu really builds up the world around Adelina and shows that this is a complex world filled with complex characters.
There are a few other characters that The Young Elites closely follows. I’m not going to get too much into talking about them specifically, but I wanted to point out that for characters who sometimes don’t get much page time, they’re remarkably well-developed. A few of them do get some significant chunks of the text, but I was still amazed at just how real they felt and how soon.
However, those characters also lead to my only real complaint with The Young Elites. Adelina’s chapters are told in first person, but then the story sometimes cuts to another character–and sections are all done in third person. This sort of point of view device was really irritating as a reader, because every single time there was a character jump it completely jarred me out of the story, and it felt like a way around having to really differ two character’s narrative voices. I would have much preferred it all be in first person or third person, and stay limited to that narration the entire time. It felt shocking to suddenly be pulled out of a first person perspective and into a third person perspective, and then back again. While the story of The Young Elites was excellent, this style of story-telling really hindered my complete enjoyment.
This review first appeared Book.Blog.Bake.