Review: Renegades by Marissa Meyer

Renegades by Marissa Meyer

Secret Identities.
Extraordinary Powers.
She wants vengeance. He wants justice.

The Renegades are a syndicate of prodigies--humans with extraordinary abilities--who emerged from the ruins of a crumbled society and established peace and order where chaos reigned. As champions of justice, they remain a symbol of hope and courage to everyone...except the villains they once overthrew.

Nova has a reason to hate the Renegades, and she is on a mission for vengeance. As she gets closer to her target, she meets Adrian, a Renegade boy who believes in justice--and in Nova. But Nova's allegiance is to a villain who has the power to end them both.

GOODREADS // AMAZON

Buddy read this book with the awesome Amy@ A Magical World of Words. You can find her review HERE!

I walked into this book with sky high expectations because-

• I LOVE SUPERHEROES. (I’m a DC girl though. Sue me.)
• The blurb reminded me of X-men?! You can’t blame me for hoping to find Hugh Jackman and Michael Fassbender within this book.
• I love The Lunar Chronicles (so yeah I’m yet to read book 3 but I love them okay??!)
• From the Goodreads blurb, I could see there was the ‘Enemies turned Lovers’ trope which I enjoy.
• The cover is glorious. (Hi! I cover buy. Yeah maybe it’s a bit shallow. Or maybe it’s just being aesthetic. *shrugs*)
• The ARC reviews said there was a lot of diversity!

That’s an actual legit picture of me flying Amy into the book. (Well obviously I’m Iron Man.)

So the story started off great! We start off with Nova’s backstory explaining why she’s gonna grow up to be a ‘villain’. Then we’re in the present where our group of villains are planning an attack and I start to think ‘hmmm that feels like a cliche?’ But obviously I ignore the warning signs and plough on because suddenly we have these pretty awesome action scenes and wonderful descriptions from Marissa Meyer. I’m happy right? So obviously the Universe can’t handle that and thinks, ‘What can we do to make Uma annoyed?’ The Universe decides to eff up the book I’m reading.

Suddenly there’s cliches flying left and right. Cheesy ‘superhero’ ‘supervillain’ dialogues are showing off themselves in all their glory. I realize the main characters, Nova and Adrian are cardboard cutouts called ‘Cliche heroine from every YA action book ever’ and ‘Mr. I need to prove myself so I’m gonna run around creating messes then try to clean it all up’ respectively.

“Now we're talking. Let's go be superheroes!”

Actual picture of me morphing even as I read the book.

Like don’t get me wrong, the book sure WAS entertaining but I demand to see that guy I call “PLOT”.OKAY? He was nowhere and then when he did drop by, he was all over the place. I’m not sure which one is worse.

What made me go all Hulk on this book?

• Nova is dull dud #1. She has such a weak reason why she’s a super-villain. I get why she’s not a huge fan of the Renegades but you don’t go hunting the people that weren’t at the crime scene; you hunt the people who did the crime. Also she’s this PERFECT fighter. She does nothing wrong. She’s ALWAYS amazing. She is BORING.
• Adrian is dull dud #2. He’s just bland. There is nothing about his personality that made his character stand out for me. He’s attracted to this girl he met ONCE for no apparent reason. He reminded me of almost every YA male lead ever.
• The forced romance of above described dull duds who have no chemistry whatsoever but they’re the leads! The *must* be a couple *eye-roll*
• For a book lacking a proper plot, it sure was a looooong one.
• A guy disappears and suddenly a mysterious superhero appears. A girl disappears and a mysterious supervillain appears. No one, I mean NO ONE thinks “Oh hey, that’s fishy!”.
• I had five questions when I started the book. The book ends by adding 50 more questions. WUT?

“It became the strong against the weak, and, as it turns out, the strong were usually jerks.”

BUT there were some pretty cool things in the book too that *almost* redeemed it for me.

Actual image of you right now.

• THE DIVERSITY! We have Nova who’s half filipino and half Italian. We have Oscar who is a disabled superhero. Adrian has two dads, happily married and incredibly supportive. It was so refreshing to gay superhero dads raising their son wonderfully and also like saving the world and I totally ship them!
• The Superpowers! I loved how the powers were not all like the common powers superheroes have. There's Honey who can control bees, Ruby who forges weapons with her blood and so many more freaking awesome prodigies. (In this book it’s people with superpowers)
• The amazing band of secondary characters. So the leads were cardboard cutouts but I LOVED how amazingly well written and three dimensional the secondary characters were; especially the Anarchists (‘The bad guys’).
• Marissa Meyer’s writing is always a plus. Everything was so vividly described and I LOVED the action scenes and the dialogues are pretty awesome(except for the cheesy one liners at times.).

“It's a terrible shame he's a Renegade, isn't it? Otherwise, you could have asked him to stay for dinner.”

I strongly feel this would have been better as a movie? If you don’t mind cliches and want an entertaining book, Renegades might be for you. The book had it’s good parts and while I WILL be reading the sequel, I won’t go into it with high expectations. I’m hoping that with book 2, we’ll have more of a plot and the main leads would evolve to be three dimensional characters. For me the best parts about this book were the diversity, the world and the secondary characters.

Have you read Renegades? Do you plan to? If you have read it, what did you think about it? Also what do you think of my new review format? I got tired of writing reviews in too much of an ordered manner and decided to have more fun writing them! 

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