Review: The Rose Society by Marie (The Young Elites #2)

If The Young Elites was good, then The Rose Society transcended any and all of my expectations. It's darker, sexier, and just fuller than the first one. Adelina has truly come into her own.

Adelina is supposedly the villain in her own story, but she never feels that way to me. Never once do I feel any sort of resentment or hatred towards her. She may be hell-bent on her revenge, but Marie Lu writes in such a way that Adelina is completely justified for her thoughts and actions. I root for Adelina. I hate her enemies with her. I feel myself descending into her madness alongside her. She is always in the right.

My few complaints from the previous book have been completely nullified. While I originally had a problem with flip-flopping perspectives (Adelina's lengthy chapters told in first person and random, shorter chapters in third), I find this book much more consistent in its presentation. I even looked forward to the random breaks in Adelina's monologue, where the side characters take over. Maeve, Teren, and Raffaele are all complex, sophisticated characters, each with an ulterior agenda.

Marie Lu does an excellent job balancing the new characters with the old. She doesn't bog us down with too many of them. It's wonderful to meet this new cast and to get a more in depth experience of all of their individual powers.

I must say that I now get the *big deal* surrounding Teren. I found him rather tedious in The Young Elites, but now he seems to be one of the most complicated characters in the story. I'm beyond eager to see what will come into play for him in the next book.

On the other hand, in The Young Elites, Enzo was one of my favorite characters, and now I find his presence a tad... offensive. I suppose coming back from the Underworld would change anyone, but it's easy to resent him when one takes into account the hypocrisy with which he treats Adelina. It's like my perspectives have flipped. It's complicated. 

It's all complicated. And that's one of the most amazing things about it. All the characters are so real; the world itself is well planned. This story is built upon layer upon layer upon layer, each layer being gradually revealed to us as deeper and more tangled than the last. 

I am both dreading and eagerly anticipating the ending. Who am I kidding? I'm basically drooling over it, desperate for it. But the dread is still intact. The biggest reason for this is that I know from my previous experience with the Legend series that Marie Lu will not write easy or tidy endings. There will be finality and closure, yes, but it will most likely rip some hearts to shreds in the process. It will probably rip up my own. Oh, I love sad endings, but they are still tremendously difficult to read.

I really can't praise this series enough. It's not just that this is an impeccable book; it's also that Marie Lu is an impeccable writer. I fully intend to read anything and everything she publishes.

Review: The Young Elites by Marie Lu (The Young Elites #1)

Adelina Amouteru is a maimed survivor of a blood fever that wiped out multitudes of adults and left even more children scarred. From this fever has risen a group called the Young Elites, marked young people with supernatural abilities born from their illnesses.

Adelina herself lost her mother and an eye to the sickness. For years, she has lived in fear of her hateful and volatile father who favors her beautiful and perfect sister, Violetta. When Adelina overhears her father making a bargain to sell her, she flees for her life and ends up killing her father with powers she did not know she possessed.

As always, I am blown away by the intricate world Marie Lu has woven together. I'm particularly impressed with this world because it is entirely original (or at least as original as a fictional world can be). Unlike Legend, which is dystopia, a future version of the world its readers live in, the world in The Young Elites has its own countries, creatures, races, religions, and even illnesses. I personally loved how detached from the reality this book is. It's been a long time since I've read a good fantasy. Every word and sentence in this book feels well thought out; it all seems to matter.

Not to mention how likable I find Adelina to be. For writers it's a difficult job to make a precocious character relatable to his or her audience. Much of the time they come across as pompous or holier-than-thou or just plain better, but Adelina seems like a very real person with a whole lot of reasons to give into the darkness that makes up her character.

And can I just add her darkness is fabulous? You don't often find this kind of legitimate dark emotion, especially not in YA. Despite the fact that it's fantasy, this sort of emotion is REAL, while so much else seems forced or insincere. There are some incredibly powerful scenes where Adelina is struggling with herself, half of her thrilling at her ability to make the world suffer and the other half lamenting over who she is becoming. I am ecstatic to find out in later books whether her powers seize control over her or if she will learn to tame them into submission.

One thing I do not like is the flipping back and forth between perspectives. I am very picky about this sort of thing anyway, but, since most of the book is told by Adelina, the other POVs seem unnecessary and honestly a little... inconsistent. The fact that other perspectives appear so infrequently makes them feel like a cop out; it's like those breaks exist only to tell the reader something that they couldn't learn from Adelina. This is fine, but I would have preferred either the whole story be told by Adelina or for it to have been broken up more steadily throughout AND for there to be consistency regarding first person and third person voice...

This is not to say that the other characters are not good or well rounded. In fact, I like most of them pretty well. There are a few who I do not care for-like Dante and Terren. This is not because they are bad characters (bad meaning "villainous"), but because they seem less complicated than the others. Dante never once wavers from whom I initially thought he would turn out to be. For that matter, neither does Terren. I have read plenty of reviews that say he turns out to be double-sided and deeper than he initially seems to be, but it never quite feels that way for me. He's also just the same character I thought he'd be.

Now Enzo... He's fantastic-dark and dangerous and complicated. The romance with him is subtle, but it's also filled with insatiable tension and holds the potential for so much more. 

Marie Lu has singlehandedly changed my mind about series. Until this year, I had a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with them and I just could not fathom how so many authors stretch a book limp over the course of three or more books when it could have been a perfectly good standalone. However, Legend and now The Young Elites are proving to me what a good series is: fantastic world development, intricate characters, and intoxicating romance. 

Though I did not find this book to be quite as compelling as the Legend series, I am still anxious and excited to see what is waiting in The Rose Society.