Review: Illusive

Illusive 
Author: Emily Lloyd-Jones
Series: Illusive, Book 1
Release date: July 15, 2015
Published by: Little, Brown Book for Young Readers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ciere is a thief who has very special skills...she can blend in with her surroundings so well that you could be standing right in front of her and not see her. Pretty handy! When the MK virus got a vaccine to control the epidemic, there were side effects for some. They gained special abilities. Ciere is one of them; she's an illusionist. But when a job goes bad, she teams up with a group of people/criminals to do another job that might just fix everything, or make everything much worse.

My thoughts: I think with this book my hopes for it were so much higher then what I feel like I got. I LOVED Tahereh Mafi's Shatter Me series and have been hoping and waiting for something that's as amazing as that one ever since. This just wasn't it. I did like the idea of what was happening with the "Heist Society" + "X-Men" plot, but it just didn't get pulled off completely for me. Now, ask me if I'm going to read book 2 = YES! I'm still hoping for more! I was just underwhelmed with this I guess...

I thought the abilities were interesting. The fact that they only could get them if they'd gotten the vaccine was a cool idea. I also thought that how there were only a certain set of abilities that had manifested was an interesting way to go too. 

The characters are where I had a hard time. Ciere was not someone I could connect with which made things difficult for me as a reader. She froze up, wasn't brave, wasn't an empowering female like I'm always looking for in female lead characters. I get that teenagers don't want to listen to adults. I get that completely, but it was rather overdone with this character. It made Ciere seem a bit ridiculous since blowing them off for her meant that she was then completely out of other options because she was terrible in a fight scene. 

Like I said, I AM going to read book 2 and I'm looking forward to it because I'm hoping that Ciere is going to grow out of some of this junk that really bothered me. Perhaps that has been Lloyd's plan all along. Plus, the general plot and ideas are pretty cool! I saw that Andye @ReadingTeen.net thought the Audiobook was good so I might try that out too. 

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