Powerless: The Hunger Games, but romantasy … and bad

Author: Lauren Roberts

Rating: ⭐️⭐️

Have you ever thought, what would The Hunger Games be like if it was romantasy and also if everything significant or interesting was stripped away? Well, if that sounds appealing, I give you: Powerless.

Powerless follows our teenage heroine, Paedyn, a girl with no supernatural powers living in a kingdom where everyone has powers and anyone who doesn’t is exiled or killed by the order of the King.

In this kingdom, there is an annual ritual called the Purging Trials where teenagers fight each other for . . . reasons? Honestly, the reason behind the trials is unclear, but whoever wins gets a lot of prize money, and Paedyn has been chosen to compete in these trials. While staying at the palace and training for the trials, Paedyn gets to know the two princes, Kitt—the older one and the future king—and Kai, the future enforcer who is also competing in the trials on the order of his father.

For a 500 page book with supposedly life or death games, a half-baked love triangle, and an attempt at an enemies-to-lovers romance, nothing much happens here, and it’s unclear why we’re supposed to care about these characters, their struggles or this world.

My biggest criticism of this book is the lack of stakes or agency for any of the main characters. They both seem to be swept away by the plot rather than driving it. I mostly didn’t mind the trials themselves, but the in-between was boring and repetitive as Paedyn and Kai repeatedly put knives to each other’s throats and engaged in sub-par banter for no apparent reason.

This, on top of the fact that so much of it seemed to be a rip-off of The Hunger Games (people also compare it to Red Queen, though I haven’t read that), made this extremely popular romantasy book thoroughly disappointing. I probably wouldn’t have minded this book taking heavy inspiration from other works if it had been executed in a more enjoyable way and if the author had taken the time to make the events fit the world she’d chosen rather than trying to write her way around the lack of technology by inventing magic human cameras (I understand you can make fantasy whatever you want it, but the Sights felt lazy).

I should point out that this is YA, and I do think my teenage self would have had a better time here, but unfortunately, I couldn’t look past these glaring flaws or the angsty, melodrama of the two main characters enough to turn my brain off and try to enjoy the story.