Is ‘Powerless’ by Lauren Roberts worth the hype? Or is it just ripping off famous YA novels?
Eh, undecided.
I have to admit that I had previously DNFed the audiobook as the narration just wasn’t working for me, but I was determined to find out what the hype was for so I grabbed myself a Kindle version and got stuck in. And for the first 40% my main reaction was ‘wtf is this?’.
‘Powerless’ isn’t great literature. It’s overly long and the writing is weak, and it really should have been given a professional edit after being picked up by traditional publishing. Why does that happen? Surely one of the benefits of going from self-publishing to traditional publishing is having a professional team who’s job it is to make your book better…
From the very beginning, ‘Powerless’ feels like a rip off of ‘The Hunger Games’, ‘Red Queen’, ‘Poison Study’ and ‘Throne of Glass’ just as first glance. It felt so ridiculously close to ‘The Hunger Games’ that I literally started making a list of the things lifted straight from one of the most famous and popular YA series of the last twenty years:
The Trials themselves aka The Hunger Games
The structure of Loot versus the palace, aka the Districts versus the Capitol
The Bowl aka the Arena
The Whispers aka the forest setting of the 64th Hunger Games in book one
Paedyn’s preference of a bow and arrow, even making her own arrows aka Katniss’s biggest skill and what keeps her alive in the Games
How Paedyn kills the wolf with the bow aka how Katniss kills the Mutts at the end of the Games
Emergency supplies randomly located throughout the Whispers aka the supplies in the Cornucopia and what is parachuted in from Haymitch
Paedyn and Kai teaming up aka Katniss and Peeta, Katniss and Rue teaming up
And yet ‘Powerless’ is completely missing the background, the depth, and the world-building that ‘The Hunger Games’ is a master of from the beginning. There was so little foundation to what the Trials usually is, what you win, why you should want to win, how you get nominated and chosen, or how many Trials there are. It’s so vague and there’s nothing to grasp into and it continually threw me out of the story because how can I understand Paedyn’s panic if I don’t know why she needs to be panicking. I understand that the focus was that the Trials would be different for the endlessly repeated ‘sixth ever’ Trials would be different because of Kai’s involvement, but how can we be shocked by how different it is if we don’t know what they usually look like? It was so frustrating that I had to rant to Sarah multiple times to get it off of my chest.
But then I suddenly started enjoying it even as I was cataloguing the multiple issues with ‘Powerless’… I don’t know what changed, but it clicked with me, even though the issues have not gone away and I’m fully aware that it’s still not good and has a plethora of issues, I just maybe don’t care about that anymore?
I also fully love Kai which may be a contributing factor…
The angst of that man is impressive and I’m a real sucker for ‘he falls first’ which is present in ‘Powerless’, but the end of the novel completely changes the dynamic between Paedyn and Kai and I’m so curious as to what is going to happen with them, although I’m sure their endgame is pretty inevitable.
Written by Sophie
