Powerless by Lauren Roberts | Why It Fails to Impress!!

Hi there!!!!

Welcome to Quills and Pages. This is Quills and today I will review one of the booktok viral books; Powerless by Lauren Roberts. I was forced to purchase this book because I kept hearing about how great and awesome that book is, how amazing the enemies to lovers trope is in this book. So, prepare to be amazed while I ripped apart this absolutely loss of potential.

Blurb

She is the very thing he’s spent his whole life hunting.

He is the very thing she’s spent her whole life pretending to be.

GENRE
Romantasy

THEME AND TONE
Okay

LANGUAGE AND WRITING STYLE
Easy to Read

CHARACTERS
Predictable characters but I liked them individually

TROPES

☙ This is NOT an enemies to lovers Romance

☙ Young Adult Romantasy

☙ Deadly Games

☙ Slow burn (it was so slow that it did not burn)

☙ Mysterious Past
☙ Special powers for special people

MY REVIEW
I got to purchase Powerless because everyone on all of social media was raving about how great Paedyn and Kai are, how amazing their enemies to lovers trope is, how cute the banter is between them. Well, it's not that great. A fair warning prepare to be disappointed.

As someone pointed out they are done with booktok recs.......I am also done with booktok recs. Booktok people either do not read good stuff or they just do recs based on one person whose video went viral. Let's get into review.

First of all this is not an enemies to lovers romance, there is absolutely no enmity going on. Paedyn is orphan, living in streets of Loot which is the poor part of the capital. she also has a best friend Adena who loves to sew beautiful things. Paedyn steal from rich people to fend for her and her friend. She steals from Kai and the accidently saves him before knowing he was a Prince and the future enforcer for the Kingdom of Ilya and from their the story starts. She then was selected to play in a deadly series of games (which are not very deadly it turns out). Author tried to make them deadly but they were not.

Then their is banter happening for good part of the book between kai and Paedyn and it was an excruciating pain to read that banter which was repeating in the same manner again and again. Like I have rea some really really good banters between enemies to lovers and whatever is happening in this book is not banter at all to be honest it was just boring conversation between two stupid people. I am not saying Paedyn or Kai are stupid. I like these characters...individually......not when they are interacting with each other. Their monologues in their head was better than the said " banter".

Next up let's talk about "deadly games". What kind of games are these. To stay in a forest for 7 days, to climb a mountain and fight one another and steal a flag? what was that? Atleast the last game was somewhat interesting. That one was dangerous deadly game.

There are also some really good parts in the book that I liked. First is Loot....I loved the how Loot was described in the start of the book....the cozy chaos of that area is just perfection. I also loved Kai and Kitt dynamic as brothers and the third adopted brother was a great addition. Adena and Paedyn dynamic was also really great. The first fight scene where Paedyn save Prince Kai was 🔥. These are the things that made this book readable.

I originally gave this book 4 stars because of the ending. Because in heat of the moment I was like it was a good ending but then I think it through and I was unsatisfied. There is a certain death in the end that was unpredictable and it was sad. But the fighting scene between Pae and the King was unsatisfactory. I feel like something is missing but I cannot put a finger on it. In short this book had potential it could have been a lot better.