I'm having a hard time trying to describe how I feel about this one. I picked this book up because I was promised a story in which the dead are taking over and those who raise them are given positions of power. While I wasn't too excited about it, I'd heard good things about it (and, I'll admit, I got hooked in by pretty cover art....sue me) so I decided to give it a try. And so...well, let's just get this things started.
Odessa lives in a land governed by the dead. The royal family has been revived by the Necromancers for years, continuing their reign for over a hundred years. As far as Necromancers go, Odessa is revered by many as the Sparrow, she who flies between the world of the living and the world of the dead in no time at all. But things change when the dead are being captured and turned into Shades, deadly, mindless creatures with only death and destruction on their minds. As Odessa suffers a terrible loss, she soon becomes aware of a plot to destroy the royals and her way of life completely.
Okay...in short, I can sum up my problem with this book in three words: trying. too. hard. There's just...too many things going on in this book and it tries to be too many different things. It wants to be a complex, fantasy dystopian (like almost every other book nowadays). It wants to be a deep, thought provoking tale about overcoming grief. It wants to be about diversity and overcoming addictions and the positive effects of change and...a lot of things. As a result, everything it tries to be just doesn't pan out very well. The plot the story starts out with pauses for about a hundred pages while it goes on a tangent. The story just stops for the longest time in the middle of the story and barely picks up again towards the end. As a result, the pace is incredibly slow and the story drags.
Odessa is a bisexual person of color but that alone isn't enough to make her stand out. She has little to no personality, makes incredibly stupid decisions, and some of her inner monologues are...alarmingly self-pitying and destructive. When she suffers a tragic loss, she becomes addicted to a potion for the sole reason that it causes her to hallucinate about the person she lost (I got some SERIOUS Twilight PTSD flashbacks from that little tidbit). The other characters...I don't remember crap about them besides their assigned diversity tropes: the token gay guys, the freethinking Disney princess, the third wheel, the rebound....I'm sorry but I just had the hardest time caring about any of them. The world was just as flat as the characters as well, unfortunately. For some reason, a person's eye color is what determines their power in this world....how? Why? I don't get it. What the heck does eye color have to do with magic powers? How does having blue eyes allow you to bring back the dead? How does having green eyes make you control animals? I don't know. Nobody knows. It's unexplained. The undead king has outlawed change during his absurdly long reign...why? What's the big danger with change? Why are hot air balloons so horribly forbidden but recycling the same dead people over and over again totally okay? It felt more like the author just cobbled together the world based on "wouldn't it be cool if" logic. It just didn't work.
Now, poor characters and weak world building can be...tolerated...if the story is at least good, right? Well, no such luck because I saw everything coming in this book. And I mean everything. Every twist was obvious, every detail was standard, I just didn't care for it. Now, it tries to say meaningful things. It almost does at times. The stuff about overcoming grief had promise, it really did! But in the end...it took her a week to overcome addiction and a new, potential love interest to get over the person she loses. The speed of it all just makes takes all the impact it could have had. It's too easy and it's not nearly as strong as it wants to be.
Final Verdict
Boring. Just...just boring. Generic. Unimaginative. I didn't like this one at all. I'm sure this will be up someones alley and, if you enjoyed it...that's cool but I just don't get it. If you still wanna give it a shot, save your cash and check it out at your local library.
Have you read the book? What did you think? Comment below and share your thoughts. Please make sure to Follow Midnight Readings for instant updates. Have a book you'd like me to read or would like to make a recommendation? Contact me on goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/65448711-michelle-beer
Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/Powerless-Shelley-Miller/dp/1543482546/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519062043&sr=8-1&keywords=powerless+by+shelley+miller
Xlibris: https://www.xlibris.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-001175242
Next Time: The creatures of darkness lead some pretty interesting lives, it turns out....
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