A Sea of Stars

Pretty much spent the whole time reading this with this face:



Yeah, I know it's a series. I get that. But when the first book of a series is so purposefully vague and confusing (with boring characters to boot), that's when I get upset.


COVER:

I thought it was pretty neat cover at first. "Wonder what that yellow stuff is..." But then I couldn't figure out if the cover actually had anything to do with the book. And THEN it hit me. YELLOW POWDER. Sooooo does that mean that the yellow powder they're feeding the kids in the cells to repress their powers is...significant? Is it gonna come back?? Is there more to be revealed behind this seemingly unimportant yellow powder?? Or what? 


CHARACTERS:

Jack. Jack was the saving grace of this, because it sure as hell wasn't Laura or Alec or even Aubrey, who I did warm up to microscopically once she stopped being totally stupid. But I guess my issue is that, not only were all of them boooring, Alec and Laura are legitimately evil and I could never figure out why they were the way they were, besides the fact that that's how they were raised. But honestly, do they not have normal human thoughts? Are they not capable of thinking and reasoning and realizing that maybe, just MAYBE, what they're doing isn't good? Alec seems to be pretty bloodthirsty (as well as maybe actually knowing what the hell is going on), so there may be no hope for him,  but I don't like reading about characters that I don't like or connect to.

And when I say Jack is the saving grace, what I mean is, I disliked him less than everybody else. He was still a Marty Stu. And there really is nothing that I can think of to say about him.

And as for Aubrey, I had a hard time believing her flippy-floppy conversion that took about 10 pages to go from ignoring Jack because she can't be seen with the likes of him, to being in love with him. Yeah, they were childhood friends but also YEAH, she dumped and ignored him for...how long?? Long enough that Jack was awfully forgiving when she did come around. But I suppose I can see part of her story, considering that she mostly did it so Nat wouldn't tell everyone about her invisibility. OH. And just realized *facepalm* that Nat might have been influencing Aubrey, though it is not played that way at all in the book. It was all blackmail. And the blackmail did in no way require Aubrey to treat Jack like he didn't exist. 


PLOT?

There was this drug thing that the sleeper agents were given when they were wee so they could be unstoppable mutant terrorists, but then it mutated into a virus and other kids got it and now all hell is breaking loose, not just because the terrorists have started wreaking havoc around the globe, but because the normal kids who contracted the virus have powers too and are obviously confused and the military is running around, rounding everybody up and generally being sorta unhelpful and there's just a lot going on. But WHY are there terrorist teens wreaking terror all over the globe? And WHO made up this plan??


Wait for iiiiiiiiit....







In any case, barring someone saying it gets better and actually makes you care, I won't be coming back for seconds.