queenjulien

The first pages of the book gave me a lot of hope, but it went away pretty soon.
What was in this book that let me down so much?
First of all, the world-building: it had been praised in some reviews, so I was surprised when I foun it to be unbelievable and full of holes. I thought that maybe things were going to be cleared along the book, but nope.
The story is about children getting superpowers as some kind of side-effect of an often mortal disease. But little is explained about the said disease and its course, so it's like all these children woke up some day with superpowers. Which is not really believable, if you ask me. Also, how are we expected to believe that so many parents would send away their children to reformation camps without even visiting the premises before to see how things are? Or without visiting the children after sending them away?
The other problem I had with the book is difficult to explain, so I'm going to use a metaphor. Reading this book was like standing in a dark room with a flashlight in hand, being able to see only bits and pieces of what is going on, enough to feel that whatever is going on is pretty good, but not enough to actually understand it.
The story was good, but there was definitely something wrong with the writing, with the rhythm, so the whole book felt like a beautiful song sang by someone who couldn't hit the right notes. The protagonist felt more like a narrator than an actual person, I never really connected with her and she was quite annoying until the ending of the book.

Overally, I expected much more from this book after reading some enthusiastic reviews.