Renegades by Marissa Meyer

Title: Renegades
Author: Marissa Meyer

Some spoilers contained below.  Read at your own risk.

Cover: At first I didn't particularly care for the cover, but after reading the book, I feel that it fits the book pretty well.  Still not sure that someone would pick it up based off the cover though.

Review: I really wanted to like this book.  I loved Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles series, and I enjoyed her book Heartless.  But I felt going in that I might not like this one as much, and I was right.  Actually I was pretty disappointed with it, and maybe that was because I was expecting to be disappointed.  Right from the start, before the book even started, there is a character list that includes the powers of the characters, and some of those powers made me cringe.  More on that in a moment.

The premise is that some people, many people, have super powers and these people are called prodigies.  Years ago a prodigy named Ace Anarchy rose up in power.  He believed that prodigies should not have to hide their power.  He was seen as a villain, and villains ruled the world for a while.  Eventually superheroes began to surface, and they called themselves Renegades.  They finally took down Ace and the villains.  So states the prologue of our story.  When our main character, Nova, is six years old her family is killed by hitman hired by a gang of villains. The Renegades had promised to protect her family, so Nova grows up hating the Renegades, and following the man the rescued her, her uncle, Ace Anarchy.  After her uncle is killed, she remains with the villains.

Our present day story begins ten years after Nova's family was killed.  Nova is now sixteen and a villain herself, called Nightmare.  She is preparing to kill the head of the Renegade council, Captain Chromium.  When this does not go as planned, she infiltrates the Renegades as a spy to learn more about them, hoping to take them down from the inside.  She doesn't plan to develop feelings for Adrian, the head of her team, but of course she does.  He is the other main character, and the story switches to his point of view at times.  His power is the ability to sketch things and make those things come to life.  He uses this ability to create an alter ego, The Sentinel.

The fact that a romance would build between Nova and Adrian was expected, but I'm not too bothered by that.  I'm more annoyed by the powers of some of the characters, as I mentioned above.  Namely, Danna, or Monarch's ability to turn into a swarm of butterflies.  Really?!? A swarm of butterflies.  What good is that?  It is supposed to allow her to be good at surveillance.  I guess.  I got the feeling that Meyer knew that people would find her unbelievable because she tried to make everyone in the book not question her.  Not that she was in the book much.  Other characters just seemed to have powers taken directly from our world's comic books.  I just found them not original enough.  Quite a ways into the book, I remembered reading Zeroes by Scott Westerfeld and thinking that the powers of the characters in that series were pretty original and interesting, so I think Meyer could have done a better job.  I felt like other parts of the book were repetitive as well.

I kept reading because I enjoyed her other works.  I there to be a big twist at the end.  There is indeed a twist at the end, but it didn't make me love the book.   I just wanted more out of this book, and it didn't deliver. There is a sequel coming in November 2018, and I will read it in the hopes of redemption for the series, but I don't have high hopes for it.

After some more thought: 

Spoilers Ahead: 

One thing I really wanted out of this book was for the villain girl not to become a cheerful little good girl superhero.  Thinking about more in depth, she did become friendly with her Renegade team, yes, and she did develop feelings for Adrian, but she does return to her feelings that the Renegades betrayed her family.  And more importantly, when she finds out about Agent N and that the Renegades plan to use to take prodigies powers if they do not become Renegades, she is convinced that the Renegades are not the good guys.  I do like that we see this, that just because they are the "heroes" they are not necessarily the good guys.  There are good heroes in the Renegades, like Adrian, and perhaps his dads, but not all of them are good.  Then again, what we're seeing is that while Nova calls herself a villain and associates with villains, not all of them are villains either.  It's not all black and white.