Powerless: The Synthesis by Jason Letts

All children are born with a special power. Some show quickly, some don’t. Some are useful, some aren’t. Some even kill the child. For 15 years, Mira’s parents have kept her hidden behind the mist her father can create with his power. They decide to let the mist go and send her to school for her last school year. There she discovers a world she never realized existed. Students are being taught to become soldiers in the neverending war. More important than learning facts and figures, the kids are taught to use their gifts to get through three trials to ultimately determine which will be the leader of the graduating class.

There were so many annoyances and plot holes in this book. It was a huge deal that Mira’s powers hadn’t showed, but there was a girl in her class with the same issue so that excuse of keeping her behind the mist doesn’t make sense (and of course was not the actual reason, but before Mira found out the real reason, she accepted her parents’ excuse without question even though she knew the other powerless girl was not locked up in her house for years). Once Mira’s parents let her out of the mist, they became, literally, the worst parents on the planet. Instead of helping her navigate the confusion of how the school works and dealing with not having a power while the others do, they just kind of left her to it and became ridiculously hands off. Except when a mirror that belonged to Mira’s grandmother got broken accidentally. That was pretty much the end of the world. There was a game that’s apparently the worst thing ever according to parents, but was really just a not so horrible game of truth or dare with pictoral dice and weird rules (like randomly getting rid of some of the pictures if the other players can’t make them fit together). In school, the teacher was a complete idiot, teaching them things like a watched pot takes longer to boil. The students were nearly as stupid, but Mira knows everything because her parents taught her at home all those years. Sometimes Mira seemed fine and communicated with others well and other times she was just completely naive and weird. Winning the final trial was the most important thing, all all that really mattered was the powers they were born with. The kid that sweats oil and the kid that senses other people’s powers were at a serious disadvantage to the kid who can jump far distances and the kid who can control gravity. The final trial is pretty much Hunger Games without the killing. Powerless: The Synthesis is the first book in a series. While the premise is interesting and the story was sometimes interesting, there was enough that irritated me that I will not be reading any more of them.

3 (out of 5) Stars

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