Audio Review : The Rose Society by Marie Lu
The Rose Society by Marie Lu
Narrated by Carla Corvo & Lannon Killea
Pages/Time : 395/11h07
Genre : YA, fantasy
Series : The Young Elites, book 2
My Rating : 4/5
About the Book :
But Adelina is no heroine. Her powers, fed only by fear and hate, have started to grow beyond her control.
My Thoughts :
This will be a short review, because I don’t want to spoil anything!
I was eager to start The Rose Society after having enjoyed The Young Elites so much – in fact, I jumped right into it when I finished listening to the first book. I was hoping for the story to get bigger – and it did. I was also hoping to see more of Adelina’s dark side – and I did.
The Rose Society takes what made The Young Elites so intriguing and cranks it up a notch. Adelina gets more conflicted as her dark side grows, and her decisions get more difficult. There’s a complexity to her choices – like the best villains, she isn’t cruel just for the fun of it. Her past motivates her as much as it breaks her, and the why behind her actions is often easy to understand – it’s the how that’s the problem!
My main complaint would be the same as with the book before : the story got slow at times, and somewhere in the middle I felt it was a bit aimless. Though I enjoyed the progression of Adelina’s character, the story itself suffered a bit, in my opinion, of the middle-book-syndrome. It felt a bit like a bridge between book 1 and 3 – which I’m really looking forward to reading now!
As I said, this is a bit of a short review. I mostly wanted to note that I still enjoy the story very much. We don’t get to read a lot of stories where the main character is an anti-hero or villain in YA, and this one is done extremely well. So far I feel as though the author didn’t compromise when writing Adelina, and I have no idea whether book 3 will be a redemption story or the story of how everything falls apart – and I love that Marie Lu created such an unpredictable tale.
Bonus points for great narration, too! Again, I felt as though Carla Corvo really enjoyed playing villain, and I’ll miss having her read this story once the series is completed!
I have been meaning to read Marie Lu. One of these days I will try her! Everyone seems to like her!
She sure has some great ideas and compelling characters! I felt like her Legend series was a lot of fun and she’s great at gray areas; but I’ve found this new series to be more interesting and different from other YA fantasy series. Depends on whether you want to read on heroes or antiheroes I would say 🙂