Zeroes by Scott Westerfeld

Zeroes by Deborah Biancotti, Margo Lanagan, Scott Westerfeld
Series: Zeroes #1
Genre: Paranormal
Release Date: September 24th 2015
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Source: Publisher
Add it: Goodreads
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Don't call them heroes. But these six Californian teens have powers that set them apart

Ethan aka Scam has a voice inside him that'll say whatever people want to hear, whether it's true or not. Which is handy, except when it isn't - like when the voice starts gabbing in the middle of a bank robbery. The only people who can help are the other Zeroes, who aren't exactly best friends these days.

Enter Nate, aka Bellwether, the group's 'glorious leader.' After Scam's SOS, he pulls the scattered Zeroes back together. But when the rescue blows up in their faces, the Zeroes find themselves propelled into whirlwind encounters with ever more dangerous criminals. At the heart of the chaos they find Kelsie, who can take a crowd in the palm of her hand and tame it or let it loose as she pleases.

Books about people with superpowers give me life, and this book was great for it. There was a nice collection of superpowers here, and a couple of them were different to anything I’d seen (or read about) before which made for a nice change. That said, I didn’t love Zeroes as much as I wanted to, although it was still easy to fly through and I will definitely be reading the sequel.

For such a big book, Zeroes was a surprisingly fast read. I don’t know if it was the font or the writing style or what, but I managed to finish it in just a few hours of reading time over the course of two or so days. I don’t know what happened.

There was a lot of action packed into this book, and that took priority over the character development. In this case, I wasn’t too bothered because I enjoyed the plotting and the superpower scenes more than most of the characters, who really weren’t that interesting.

I have to say, though, that I have developed huge affections for both Thibault (who is the most adorable person in all of existence and I just want to squish his cheeks and make him get together with Ethan I MEAN WHAT) and Chizara (who deserves a bigger part in the sequel because THIS QUEEN). I didn’t care for Kelsie in the slightest and her very presence annoyed me, and the other characters were just kind of there. Ethan had a slightly bigger roll but meh, I wasn’t bothered about him unless he was with Thibault because SHIP.

I have a lot of things that I would like to see from the sequel, including more superpowers, more romance between Thibault and Ethan, and more development for Chizara. I don’t think Zeroes was particularly memorable, but it was an enjoyable read and I would definitely recommend it if you’re looking for something action-packed.