Mid-2013 is when I fell back in love with reading.  There was a giant gap between my junior/senior years of high school and my college years where I was lucky if I got through one book a year.  I'm so glad that reading is a part of my life again, and I've read a lot of good books this year.  Today I am going to share my top 5 with you.

5.  In Real Life by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang

4.  More Than This by Patrick Ness

2.  The Young Elites by Marie Lu

1.  The Archived by Victoria Schwab

The Young Elites is a new YA Fantasy series by Marie Lu. Marie Lu also wrote The Legend Trilogy which I read and really enjoyed. (Which I did a review of, I’ll link it below) When I heard she had a new book coming out I have to admit that I was pretty excited. 

I picked up this book shortly after it was released and started reading it around the end of October. I finished most of the book before November started and I started NaNoWriMo, but during November I found myself extremely busy with 1.) My novel, and 2.) General holiday madness! 
Needless to say, I didn’t read very much and I was not able to get through those last 100 pages until the very beginning of December.

The Young Elites is about a girl named Adelina who is a malfetto. A malfetto is a survivor of blood fever that swept through the land ten years previously. Malfetto’s are usually easy to spot, the fever left them with a physical deformity. Some have an unnatural hair or eye color, while some have markings on their skin. The malfettos are looked down on in their society. They are said to be demonic or bad luck and most people do not want to associate with them, but not all malfettos are created equally. Some malfettos were gifted with a power and these malfettos are called The Young Elites.

One night Adelina over hears her father making a deal to sell her to a man as his mistress. That night she runs away from home and in a turn of events a power within her awakens and she discovers that she is a Young Elite.

I gave this book a 4.5/5 (5/5 on the Goodreads star rating system) stars. It had its flaws, but if the entertainment value of this book hadn’t been so high the flaws would have pushed it down to a 4/5 stars. 

The beginning of the novel was bit slow, but I find that this is the case with a lot of fantasy books, especially the first installment in a series.

I felt that the world building was lacking something, but I just can’t put my finger on what. However, I found the snippets of Kenettrian literature used at the beginning of each of Adelina’s chapters to really help bring the world to life, and it was also a really unique characteristic of this novel.

Some of the characters felt flat, but that may work itself out in the upcoming books. I found that I really only cared about Adelina and Raffaele for the majority of the book, but there was one incident when Enzo showed a more vulnerable side of himself and I found myself beginning to like him.

Adelina was a very strong and unique protagonist. She is somewhat of an anti-hero, and I really loved that aspect of this novel. She also has some very interesting features. The blood fever forced them to remove one of her eyes and she has silver hair. There are very few characters that I have read about in YA books that have these sorts of physical deformities. 

Though the world building may have been lacking Marie Lu’s writing was fantastic. She can paint a scene so perfectly and with such detail that I feel like I’m there. I felt the same way when I was reading the Legend trilogy. 

The most action seems to be at the end of the book. It was packed and it took me on a crazy ride. Adelina was fighting a battle within herself while fighting a real battle and that just made everything so much more suspenseful.

If I’m being honest here, I would have to say that I enjoyed this book much more than the Legend trilogy. I feel that Marie Lu’s writing is either improving or I just like the style she used in this book.

I would recommend this book for the older YA readers. For readers who are around 12 and 13 I think that the suggestive themes and violence may be a little too heavy in this novel.