Powerless by Lauren Roberts 

Genre: Fantasy, Romance

Dual POV, Series, Young Adult 

Isabella’s Rating:★★★

Powerless follows Paedyn, an ordinary in a world full of “Elites” or people who are born with magical abilities, living in the slums hiding away from authority. Ordinaries are forbidden in their world, and are either banished or killed if they are found, so Paedyn pretends to be an elite in her society. Kai is the enforcer of the deaths of ordinaries, as well as the son of the King. Every year the King hosts a special game for the elites to play in to show off their powers, and Paedyn is thrown into the games. This is an enemies to lovers book that has angst, action, and entertaining scenes in my opinion, but is lacking in writing and plot originality.
Powerless is the first book in an ongoing series. There is a novella after Powerless following Paedyns’ best friend, Adena, called Powerful, as well as a recently published book, Reckless that is the second book following Paedyn and Kai’s story. There is going to be another book, fearless, coming out April 8, 2025.

I enjoyed this book while reading it but looking back I did not like it as much as I thought I did. This book actually made me angry at some points because of the direct scenes and ideas stolen from other books. The Hunger Games follows a similar plot, where people are taken and put into a game of sorts and tested. A lot of books do that now, and I could never get tired of it, but the way that she writes this book just puts a bad taste in my mouth. She added nothing to the plot and basically copy and pasted the ideas. Similarly, Red Queen is described as a book where ordinaries and elites are separated, there is a game the main character gets thrown into and the main character is an ordinary who falls in love with an elite. Sound familiar? Lauren Roberts took these ideas straight from the pages of Red Queen. Now while I think that some authors can take ideas from other books and make it their own, it seemed that Roberts didn’t even try to hide this or add anything to others’ ideas. Many people have pointed this out, and while I was reading it, I could find specific scenes that I have read before and know exactly what book she took it from. The image that I got from it is that she read multiple books that she was indifferent about, and thought that stealing their ideas and making it “better” would be a good idea to publish, as if she was trying to one up other authors ideas.

Some good things I can say about this book is that I loved the scenes with Paedyn and Kai, as well as the scene with Paedyn and Adena, Paedyns’ best friend. I have always loved dialogue heavy books, as you get much more attached to the characters. It is a lot easier to do the sort of “show not tell” writing in books that readers want more of. The scenes during the game that was being played in the book were very entertaining while reading, but I have to say this book is very forgettable. I can barely remember any scenes from the book and have just recently finished it in the last month. The ending of the book did have a few plot twists, which I don’t have a strong opinion on. I do think that if there was no plot twist the book could have been a stand alone, and Roberts threw it in there to keep the story going, but I still did find it entertaining.

Lauren Roberts was 18 when she started writing Powerless, and documented her journey on Tiktok where she went viral for her book content. She had a lot of fans before the book was even published, and when she finally self published the book, she sold so many copies and became so successful that a publishing company picked up the book and all books to follow.
Powerless was Roberts Debut novel, meaning that was the first book she had ever published. She has now sold well over a million copies of Powerless.