Shaykitteh's World of Books

I picked Talented to read because of the hot chick on the cover... just don't tell my husband.

Honestly though, the cover made this book stand out while I was looking through netgalley for a book to request. I read the synopsis, and the book lived up to what I expected, and more actually, because I've grown a little cynical when reading a book about a teenager with special powers.

Purplish-blue eyes are only one of the byproducts of a nuclear spill that somehow didn't kill off all humanity. When multiple nuclear plants spill their hazardous materials into the earth so that the groundwater carries the waste to the ocean and contaminates the ocean, millions of humans are killed, and plant life and animals mutate... but somehow the humans that live are just fine except that their new babies have superpowers. They can teleport objects, read minds, shape-shift into animals, control someone's mind and implant false memories, and even mimic the powers of the people around you. Plus more. I mean, don't get me wrong, there had to have been SOME disaster that prompted the Talented to gain their powers, but why does it always have to be radiation or other contamination from nuclear materials? And something this extreme probably should have wiped all life from the planet...

Anyway, on to the actual book itself. You have the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys require mandatory testing for children to see if they have Talents and essentially kidnap them and make them learn their skills. If they're good enough, they get a placement in "TOXIC" or "The Agency", as the good guys are called. I question their methods, but given the mindset of people after a disaster, I can understand if people didn't want to expose their Talents. On the other side, you have the Coalition, who oppose mandatory testing and pretty much fight against TOXIC, but since the Coalition is mainly in the poorer states, TOXIC is able to easily recruit talents to fight against them.... right?

The actual plot of the book seemed weak to me, but I liked the characters and how the character development progresses through the book. In some ways, Talia is still stuck on the one track that she thinks will take her where she needs to go to avenge her parents' murder, but she's slowly getting bumped off of that track now that she is interacting with people her own age from different backgrounds, and she's able to see the world in a different way. The blinders on her eyes are gone, and she is starting to realize that people aren't always who she thought they were. As for romance... well, I'll let you read and figure it out yourself.

All in all, this is a good book. The plot starts out a little stereotypical with a couple of minor surprises/spoilers that you may not catch when you first read it, and slowly the pieces of the puzzle start fitting together. You're still missing a few major pieces, but I'm sure the rest of the series will help pull everything together. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series.  This is NOT your stereotypical dystopian superpower book. You see the characters combine unarmed fighting with weapons with their powers with tactics... and it's a great combination, and you can tell that the author put as much thought into the fight scenes as she did into the plot that becomes more and more twisted as you read.  Now let us just hope that Talia can find her way out of the maze of deception and violence and find the truth... whatever that may be.

NOTE:  I was received this book from netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Well... sort of through netgalley. I was approved to read it by the publisher, but then I wasn't able to send it to my kindle because of a glitch so I downloaded it from Amazon since it's currently free on Amazon, so that worked out for me!

If you enjoyed my review, I would appreciate if you could mark it as being helpful on Amazon as well, as this is useful to both the reviewer and the author. I have included the link to the Amazon review in the Source section at the bottom of this review. I also highly recommend that you pick up the kindle edition of Talented by going to http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0076Y7ON4/?tag=shasworofboo-20. After all, it's free, so how can you go wrong? And if you like it, the complete collection with all four books and a novella can be purchased for $9.99, so that's not bad either!