TL;DR a very weak and melodramatic excuse for a spy novel
(finished 9/8/15)
I tried to give Talented a chance. I swear I did. Talented, however, did not even try to reciprocate the effort. I would DNFed within the first 25% of the book had it not been for my friend reading ahead of me -- we both got the ebook (I got mine free through bookbub, idk how she got hers) and we were going to try and read it at about the same pace, but around chapter 13 I hit a wall and had to force myself through the rest of the story.
I would say that I'm going to try and go easy on Talented the same way I tried to with Just Breathe, but I'm not even going to lie. I need to get it off my chest how frustrated this book made me. I was very tempted to throw my iPod a couple many times.
Let's start out with Tal. I can honestly say I like her even less as a main character and narrator than I did Daire from the Soul Seekers series, which is really sad considering I could at least get through four books with Daire. I could barely get through a third of the book with Tal before I wanted to launch her into outer space.
Tal is ~special~. She's got this ~special ability~ that's so ~rare~ and she's so ~strong~ and does not shut up about it. I can understand stating it once or twice at the beginning of the book (in a subtle way) to establish her power, but nope. She does it nearly continuously, and good lord, I have never read about a character as ridiculously overpowered as she is. A limit to her power was never established, so she can:
- read other people's minds
- project her feelings and emotions onto others
- control people telepathically, including giving them false memories
- move things telepathically
- lock and unlock doors
- blow up a cabin
I wish I was kidding about that last one. I really am. I can understand a character having one or two of these things, but all of them? No. That's ridiculous. Nothing ever stood in her way, and what fun is that? It's no fun reading when I know she's going to get her way no matter what because of how stupidly ~strong~ she is.
And also in that regard, good lord does she have a ridiculous plot shield around her. (All the other characters, too, but I'm focusing on Tal for right now.) Like, she blows up a cabin, repeatedly mouths off to the director of the program she's in (who may be the president, too, I'm honestly not sure), and he does absolutely nothing to reprimand her. She somehow ends up with two love interests, gets mad when her original boyfriend cheats as she's having feelings for another boy, and then gets jealous of other girls liking boy #2 when they're not even together yet.
I wish I could say I liked the secondary characters, but I don't. The one I only vaguely appreciated was Penny, and even then, she felt like a weak cardboard cutout of Honey Lemon from Big Hero 6. Which is really sad, considering Talented came out around two years before. Penny just ~magically~ became good friends with Tal and I honestly cannot figure out how or why their relationship grew so close. Penny was really only used to fulfill the "supportive best friend" trope and had no development of her own, nor consistent characterization.
The boys didn't have consistent characterization, either. Donovan seemed like a pretty solid boyfriend until Tal just happens to walk in on him in bed with another girl, and there's no indication of it beforehand. Like, I know you can't always know your SO is cheating on you, but if Tal is ~so special and strong~, why couldn't she pick up on him cheating the many times she looked into his head?
Henri and Erik were almost impossible for me to keep straight (ha), and at about 70% of the book I mixed up their names and got really confused when the one I thought had a boyfriend was flirting with Tal. Erik and Tal's romance felt like it came from completely out of the ballpark, not even just left field, as did a lot of Erik and Donovan's interactions with another. Erik became unreasonably defensive of Tal even when she was still with Donovan.
Also! Y'know the big bad guy, Ian Crane, who supposedly orchestrated the murder of Tal's parents? Yeah. He's a big baby. He begs and grovels at Tal's feet for her to hear him out. I cannot even begin to understand how he staged what is essentially a second civil war in the making and yet doesn't even have the guts to put his foot down in response to this spoiled brat that just waltzes right into his high-security compound and breaks into the even higher-security research basement.
Did I mention Tal's a spoiled brat? Now I did. She gets everything she could ever ask for and yet still decides to complain about it. I understand there's a certain level of privilege to be expected, but the fact the she just completely disregarded how much the agency gave to them. Everyone had an excessive amount of space, technology, and room service to their disposal, and yet they never thought twice about any of it. I really did not enjoy reading about such spoiled brats. I know it can be hard to recognize and acknowledge privilege, but good lord did Tal talk down to the other Talented people who "didn't score high enough to get a TOXIC job" and ended up doing manual service jobs around the property. Like, you think they can't get jobs anywhere else? I'm sure even people that don't have strong ~special talents~ are in positions to get better jobs than to run room service orders to spoiled teenagers.
(I'm moving on to another point because I'm sick of the word "spoiled" and yet I cannot come up with a better way to refer to Tal.)
The pacing was irritating, too. The plot is about Tal avenging her parents, right? Nope. For all I could tell, it was just about bragging about how ~special~ she is and how ~annoying~ it is to have two love interests. She spent at least twice as more screen time on a fist fight between her and Erik (or Henri, I don't remember which) than she did on a mission she went on. She's a spy -- I figured there would be more emphasis on being a spy than there would be on being a melodramatic teenage girl. Not that being a melodramatic teenage girl is necessarily bad, but it doesn't make for an interesting character or plot.
I'm actually kind of torn about the setting. Somehow I ended up with a book set on home turf again, so I was pleasantly surprised when I learned that they were in the DC area. However, there was some picking and choosing as to what actual geography was used. I appreciated that DC's building height limit was acknowledged when explaining the city, because otherwise I might've quit reading right then and there. But when you're somewhere in West Virginia, you don't have chilly days in May, nor is the closest "city" DC -- there's Cumberland, Martinsburg, Winchester, and Hagerstown in a closer radius than DC. Googling the given location of Brentwood Springs, WV gave me no results, but I used radiusmap.net to estimate "about a hundred miles west of DC" (screen 78).
Also, I just noticed a discrepancy saying the original program director "converted a military facility located in western Maryland [...] into a training facility known as The McDonough School for the Talented" (screen 68), but the Elite Headquarters are located in Brentwood Springs (screen 78). I assumed they were the same thing this entire time. Maybe that's my own fault -- but if I made it through a thousand screens without ever noting they're at least 30 or so miles apart, that's really poor worldbuilding.
All the negativity aside, Talented has a fairly good premise. I just don't think it was used effectively. I would say I'd read it if it went through more revision, but considering there are five-ish subsequent books already published, I think it's highly unlikely it's going to get re-written. I mean, I'm still curious about the Talented kids' powers and how the country ended up dividing, but those are mainly worldbuilding things and likely wouldn't be covered in a re-write, anyway.
I took a bunch of notes through iBooks, but considering how many times I used the comment feature, I'm not sure I'm up to the task of transcribing all of them into a spreadsheet. I might just make one with the worst offenders.
TL;DR I really did not enjoy it. The execution of the premise felt really weak to me and I didn't connect with the characters or the plot. To each their own, though. I think I'm in the minority out of all the people that've read this series.
(I'm moving on to another point because I'm sick of the word "spoiled" and yet I cannot come up with a better way to refer to Tal.)
The pacing was irritating, too. The plot is about Tal avenging her parents, right? Nope. For all I could tell, it was just about bragging about how ~special~ she is and how ~annoying~ it is to have two love interests. She spent at least twice as more screen time on a fist fight between her and Erik (or Henri, I don't remember which) than she did on a mission she went on. She's a spy -- I figured there would be more emphasis on being a spy than there would be on being a melodramatic teenage girl. Not that being a melodramatic teenage girl is necessarily bad, but it doesn't make for an interesting character or plot.
I'm actually kind of torn about the setting. Somehow I ended up with a book set on home turf again, so I was pleasantly surprised when I learned that they were in the DC area. However, there was some picking and choosing as to what actual geography was used. I appreciated that DC's building height limit was acknowledged when explaining the city, because otherwise I might've quit reading right then and there. But when you're somewhere in West Virginia, you don't have chilly days in May, nor is the closest "city" DC -- there's Cumberland, Martinsburg, Winchester, and Hagerstown in a closer radius than DC. Googling the given location of Brentwood Springs, WV gave me no results, but I used radiusmap.net to estimate "about a hundred miles west of DC" (screen 78).
Also, I just noticed a discrepancy saying the original program director "converted a military facility located in western Maryland [...] into a training facility known as The McDonough School for the Talented" (screen 68), but the Elite Headquarters are located in Brentwood Springs (screen 78). I assumed they were the same thing this entire time. Maybe that's my own fault -- but if I made it through a thousand screens without ever noting they're at least 30 or so miles apart, that's really poor worldbuilding.
All the negativity aside, Talented has a fairly good premise. I just don't think it was used effectively. I would say I'd read it if it went through more revision, but considering there are five-ish subsequent books already published, I think it's highly unlikely it's going to get re-written. I mean, I'm still curious about the Talented kids' powers and how the country ended up dividing, but those are mainly worldbuilding things and likely wouldn't be covered in a re-write, anyway.
I took a bunch of notes through iBooks, but considering how many times I used the comment feature, I'm not sure I'm up to the task of transcribing all of them into a spreadsheet. I might just make one with the worst offenders.
TL;DR I really did not enjoy it. The execution of the premise felt really weak to me and I didn't connect with the characters or the plot. To each their own, though. I think I'm in the minority out of all the people that've read this series.
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