Zeroes (Zeroes, #1)

by Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan, and Deborah Biancotti

[violetpeanut]

Stories about people with super-human abilities seem to hold a universal appeal for people. We all like to dream about what we could do if we could fly or if we had super-human strength. That’s why comic books and movies like the X-Men and The Avengers are always so popular. Zeroes takes the idea of super powers in a new direction. The book is about a group of teenagers who have unusual powers. When one of them gets into trouble, they band together to try and help him out. These teens don’t have the typical comic-book powers, though. There’s no flying, no invisibility (well, not really). Instead, there’s a boy who no one can seem to remember, a girl who is blind but can see through other people’s eyes, a girl who can crash electronics, a girl who can influence and control the emotions of large groups of people, a boy who has another voice inside him that knows things that he has no way of knowing, and a boy who can make a crowd love him. I love, love, love these powers. I think they are super-original and offer a lot for this group of authors to work with. There is so much potential for this series and for these characters to do really great or really terrible things. And that’s one of the themes of this book: there is no black or white. Each of these powers has potential for so much good, but also for so much evil. Like we learned from Spiderman, “… with great power there must also come–great responsibility.” These characters learn this firsthand.

Unfortunately, though, the rest of this book is pretty forgettable. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed reading it. It’s just that I read it a number of weeks ago and had to sit down and skim through it again to refresh my memory before writing this review. I remembered that I generally enjoyed it, but not what actually happened, or anything about any of the characters other than their powers. In Zeroes, the characters are their powers and that tells me that there’s not enough character development for me to remember them as anything else. I also didn’t really remember much about the plot. I remembered a couple of scenes in particular and I remembered that there was a decent amount of action, but it was hard for me to recall the specifics.

Overall, this book was fun while I read it but it wasn’t all that memorable. There are some great powers but little character development, some great action sequences but a plot that is forgettable. I’d skip buying this one and get it from the library instead. Will I read the next one? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I won’t be rushing to buy it and I won’t be requesting it but if a copy falls into my hands I would definitely read it and I’m sure I would enjoy it while it lasted.