Lady Danielle

Now, you might say 2 1/2 stars is a bad rating... maybe a book that should be 'avoided'. On the contrary, my rating system is different: 2 1/2 stars is neither bad nor good. It's both a positive and negative thing. This review helps curious readers make a decision about picking this up and keeping an open mind whilst reading. 

It is understandable why people would either love or hate this book. This has so many flaws that makes readers lose their patience with continuing with the story. So many flaws. I honestly don't know how to write this review because I have a lot of stuff I want to talk about/cover. So... brace yourselves, my friends, this is going to be a semi-lengthy post.

_____________________________________________

Every reader knows that books' greatest hamartias are:

++ Insta-love

++ Love triangles/angst

++ Too many alternating PoVs -- especially if it's not done well

++ When the readers are left with questions that are [still] unanswered 

++ A story that's not wholly original/unique

++ Frustrating/flat characters

++ Confusing/unimportant/unnecessary flashbacks

++ When the world building isn't thoroughly created/written

... I think y'all are getting the picture.

With that being said: The 100 suffers from everything that I stated above (minus the love triangle [kind of], but the angst is present).

I hope Kass Morgan will be rid of the unnecessary flashbacks in the second instalment. It takes up 35% of the story which made me skim through the flashes or skip them entirely (only reading the end. Even after reading the end of the flashbacks I got the gist of the significance). Also, Glass's point of view was superfluous. I'm still scratching my head, wondering why the hell Morgan gave her an important role to play in this story. In all honesty, I skimmed through her PoVs and I have to say you're not going to miss much if you decide to do the same.

These alternating point of views was endurable, but, dude, can Morgan please make them a little longer with a gotdamn point? This is science fiction (in a way), but the "romance" grabs the story's importance (and rather amazing premise) and gives us this sappy teenage angst. 

And the story ends there.

Morgan's writing is amazing, but her imagination for creating a world entirely of her own is not. It's somewhat unoriginal; The 100 reminded me of Across the Universe by Beth Revis... but better. Kind of. There's some world building, however, since the story goes by swiftly and the romance is thickly present, it is not noticeable -- which is very unfortunate because no one can possibly deny the amazing concept of the story: after a nuclear war (or whatever) on Earth, humans boarded a ship. A century passes and the people are content with living outer space on there. However, 100 teens will be sent to Earth to see if there's still life on the planet. 100 teens who've been labelled "criminals". For some of the teens, this is not a bad sentence; some have been wanderlust -- craving to be off the ship they've spent their whole life on. When the teens arrive, things seem pretty normal. Only problem? Food shortage as well as medicine shortage... not to mention the older teens trying "take charge"... and the animals that have evolved. 

Bellamy stood with an animal carcass draped over hid shoulders, a trail of blood in his wake.

A deer. Wells's eyes travelled over the lifeless animal, taking in its soft brown fur, spindly legs, delicately tapered ears. As Bellamy moved toward them, the deer's head swayed back and forth from it's limp neck -- but it never made a full arc, because each time it swung back, it knocked against something else.

It was another head, swinging from another slender neck. The deer had two heads.

Kass Morgan should have wrote this book in third person PoV. If you're going to write about 100 teens going to a planet that hasn't been set foot on in a hundred years, you have a shitload of explaining to do. We don't want to read about some angst-y, poor-excuse-of-a-love-triangle bullcrap story. We want to be mindfucked and have an adrenaline rush whilst reading this. This could have been one of those stories that'd leave you biting your nails and wondering what's going to happen next. Morgan, in your next book, keep the fucking flashbacks to yourself (or possibly shorten them to a paragraph summary). Also, can we please have some more action and nerve racking shit? I mean, we're back on Earth, we need to be scared shitless about the life on the uninhabited planet because we have no idea what's going to happen and no idea how to survive a place we don't really know much about. Get rid of the fucking romance. That's the thing with novels nowadays: they have this brilliant premise, yet the icky romance completely decimates the entire story. I PROMISE, it's totally fine when romance isn't present when having a novel such as this. I feel that authors think we want that for every single novel. We don't. 

I'm not really a big fan of science fiction; I enjoy fantasy, paranormal, and historical fiction more. But I can't lie and say this was a horrible one. This has the potential, but everything I've stated above ruins the story and then some. I'm praying to the book gods and Kass Morgan that the sequel will be a whole lot better than this. I love and hate this book at the same time. Would I recommend this? I honestly don't know. It's all up to you. If you want to give it a shot, or not. It's not that shocking The 100 is being adapted into a television series as we speak (I have a feeling it's going to become a guilty pleasure of mine). Hell, it probably might be better than the book.