Renegade Review

TITLE Renegade (The Elysium Chronicles #1)
AUTHOR J.A. Souders
PUBLICATION November 13th 2012 by Tor Teen
READ December 01, 2012
SOURCE Purchased

Since the age of three, sixteen-year-old Evelyn Winters has been trained to be Daughter of the People in the underwater utopia known as Elysium. Selected from hundreds of children for her ideal genes, all her life she’s thought that everything was perfect; her world. Her people. The Law.

But when Gavin Hunter, a Surface Dweller, accidentally stumbles into their secluded little world, she’s forced to come to a startling realization: everything she knows is a lie.

Her memories have been altered.

Her mind and body aren’t under her own control.

And the person she knows as Mother is a monster.

Together with Gavin she plans her escape, only to learn that her own mind is a ticking time bomb... and Mother has one last secret that will destroy them all.

I’m so torn about my feelings for Renegade. Before its release I read reviews from people who had read ARC’s of it and they were all glowing. People loved how bloody it was and how twisted the books bad guy, Mother, was. I went into this with super high expectations, I had an opening in my review schedule and thought it was finally time to sit down and soak up the awesomeness of this book. So sit down with it I did, and wait for awesomeness I did. Did that awesomeness come? Yes, but in the last 70 pages or so. And this leads me to want to talk about expectations.

I always try my hardest to stay away from reviews of books that I know I want to read eventually. I don’t want my opinion to be clouded by what I have read about the novel and I’ve come to realize that I also don’t ever want to go into a book with high expectations. I had expected some over the top bloody fun and a sick and twisted, sinister woman who calls herself Mother. I think I had glorified how epically twisted this tale would be because of what I had read about it. I honestly was wondering throughout if I was reading the same book as the people who wrote those glowing reviews.

The story revolves around Evelyn, who was adopted by Mother and deemed the Daughter of the People. She is being trained to take over for mother once she can’t rule anymore and she is also expected to couple at 16 and start popping out heirs so Mother can ensure the world of Elysium will remain under their family’s rule. I have to say that Elysium was a fascinating place, the view that is described when they look out the glass walls and see the marine life going about their business was just gorgeous. I also loved the idea of Evelyn’s garden, when I pictured it in my head it was breathtaking. While the scenery was stunning I longed for more in depth world building as far as the DNA tracking goes. The people of Elysium are all described as blonde haired and blue eyed, needless to say it seems only white people are chosen to live within the confines of the glass walls. Never are we told what makes the perfect genetic code in mother’s eyes. At one point they run a surface dwellers (someone who still lives on land, not under water) DNA through their scientific DNA readers and he is said to have the perfect genetic make up to produce children in this society, but why? I wanted to know WHAT made a person suitable for breeding, and not just their hair and eye color (his eyes weren’t even blue, they were grey.)

Now onto the grey eyed weirdo of the story. Gavin is a boy who lives on land and finds his way into Elysium via a tunnel that he finds in a cave. He is quickly captured and thrown into prison where he becomes one of Evelyn’s many tasks. She is to find out how he got into Elysium. Of course there has to be a romance, so once Evie starts questioning him she finds that surface dwellers are not the evil beings Mother has made them out to be. I wasn’t a big fan of neither Evie nor Gavin so I didn’t give a hoot about their romance. Maybe I didn’t like Evie because she was constantly being affected by her conditioning (brain wiping) and we never got know who she actually was. She was just all over the map in this and it seemed like every 50 pages she turned into someone else (which was always attributed to the conditioning.) I tired of hearing about what had been done to her about half way through and just wanted to get to know her. Gavin was pretty blah, he fell in love with Evie pretty fast even when that definitely was NOT a good idea (can’t say why because it would be a spoiler.)

The story mostly revolves around Evie helping Gavin escape Mother’s evil clutches and the twisted world of Elysium. I didn’t really find mother to be as intense as I had expected (once again high expectations suck people!) I ended up finding her pretty hoity toity and boring to be honest. Which sucks, a lot. I really need to be careful moving forward about reading glowing reviews of books that I am going to be reading myself. Would I have liked this one more if I didn’t have those expectations? I’m not sure and I guess I will never know.