The Renegades series by Marissa Meyer was supposed to be a duology. The first book, Renegades, tells the story of Gatlin City, a far distant US (probably) where people with super powers started appearing, and chaos quickly descended. A group of anarchists ruled the city, with the help of gangs. (It is unclear if members of the gangs have powers, or are just not nice people.) The Anarchists are overthrown by a group with powers (called prodigies) known as the Renegades. At the start of the first book, the Renegades rules the city on a council. Nova Artino, the main character, looses her father, her mother and her sister to an assassin when her father becomes indebted to a gang. She is rescued by her Uncle Ace, who is the head of the Anarchists. She grows up to be Nightmare, and hates the Renegades.
Adrian Everhart (groan) grows up being raised by the leaders of the council when his mother, also a Renegade, dies. He is raised by two dads. He is frustrated that his dads rule the city with too many restrictions and becomes the Sentinel, a vigilante who goes after prodigies who break the law. No one is quite sure if he is a good guy or a bad guy, which is a much more interesting concept then Adrian is himself; cute boy created to cause conflicting feelings in the interesting protagonist.
In book 1, Nova infiltrates the Renegades, takes on the alias of Insomnia, gets places on Adrian’s team (when he’s not the Sentinel, he goes by Sketch) and realizes that not all of the Renegades are bad. It ended with a bang end, and I would have thought that book 2, Archenemies, would start at the same action packed pace that the first one did. It did not.
Archenemies starts out on a simple patrol of Sketch’s team. I was listening to the audio book, and was so confused, I started over because I thought I skipped something. It starts off sloooow, and doesn’t pick up the pace. It is revealed that the Renegades have a serum that neutralizes super powers. They seem to be willing to give it to any Renegade to use as they see fit and I have a big problem with that because Adrian becomes the Sentinel because the council and the Renegades have become to set in following the rule of law and aren’t cleaning up the city fast enough.
This clearly was set up to be a duology. The will-they-or won’t they romance drags on for far too long. The set up to the dramatic conclusion and final battle….
spoilers below
Just dies. And then it ends abruptly. It left me irritated. It could have resolved. Heartless was one book. There was no reason to stretch this out. I think book 2 especially suffers because of this. I enjoyed the superhero cheese of both books. I enjoyed the premise. I guess I’ll find out how it ends. But meh. This needed an edit, and it didn’t get one. I’d give 4 stars to the first book and two stars to the second.