Alright, so I've got a video talking a little bit about this book and why I didn't really enjoy it and don't feel that I'm going to finish the series. I thought I would go a little more into detail as to what I found lacking in the book.
To me, this book was a mixture of two of my favorite teen series, Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi and The Selection by Keira Cass. I thought, "Oh Boy! This should be awesome!" It wasn't. The main character Mare is from a family that struggles, just like America's family. Mare had to steal in order to help support her family. There is a war going on that keeps taking the young and able-bodied soldiers at the front lines. The ruling class has powers and their blood is silver. Those were the elements that drew me in. The ongoing war. The ruling class having the powers. Mare's family struggles. At the same time, those are the things that made me angry with the book.
So, it turns out that Mare has powers. She's not supposed to because of her blood. She gets thrown into a situation where her life is threatened and these powers to harness electricity come to fruition. The Silver bloods decide to train her and accept her as their own in an effort to keep her blood color a secret because of how public this revelation was. They paired her up with the second son to the king and kind of enveloped her into their society. -Now, I understand this. They want to keep her close. They want to make sure she doesn't cause any problems. But, why train her in the manner that they did? They could have easily explained away her death if they hadn't trained her and some rebels broke in or something. But that wouldn't have been conducive to the story...
The Scarlet Guard was another element that just bugged the crap out of me too. So, Mare joins up with them. She had been in contact with them a little before she found out she had powers. My biggest issue with them was their willingness to trust Maven, Mare's betrothed and the second son of the king. He plays the tortured misunderstood son well enough, but I feel that the willingness to believe him was a little too quick for the Scarlet Guard. Maybe the author was trying to get across that they were desperate or something, because that's how it feels. Desperate. The Scarlet Guard is desperate to have people on its side.
The betrayal of Maven and his mother at the end was really not surprising to me. There was no shock factor. I saw it coming. The queen had been hinting at stuff throughout the whole book and Maven was way too willing to give away certain people to be believable as a rebel. If it hadn't been for the love interest between Cal and Mare, I would have thought that Cal would have died with his father, but they needed a scapegoat, I guess.
Book two was where I stopped reading. Mare and Cal escape and basically the part that I read was them going around in circles trying to get to other red bloods with powers while trying to stay away from Maven. They kept failing. And then there was some half-assed not so believable love/hate thing between Cal and Mare. It got boring. The plot seemed to repeat itself every few chapters. Ain't nobody got time for that.
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