By Kiera Cass
2 Stars
Twenty years have passed since America Singer and Maxon Schreave were married. Now their daughter, a reluctant Princess Eadlyn, must make her own Selection. Eadlyn opens her home to thirty-five suitors, among them a boy she’s known (and hated) her whole life, a boy who doesn’t speak English, and a handful of troublemakers. At first, she wants nothing more than to return to the single life she’s comfortable with, but the more time she spends with her guests, the more difficult it becomes for her to imagine life without them. On every date and after every kiss, she learns something about herself, she learns something about her people, and she questions what she thought she knew about love.
***
I wasn’t sure how to rate this book. I hovered between two and three stars, but I decided to go with two for a couple of reasons. First, the writing felt a little dull. Second, while I did admire how open-ended this book was—I think it’s one of the first love stories I’ve read where it wasn’t clear right from the beginning who the main character was going to end up with—, I realized I wasn’t all that crazy about any of the candidates. There’s one I hold slightly above the others, but even he got on my nerves a few times.
Then there was the main character herself. I saw parts of myself in Eadlyn, but I also saw a whole lot of spoiled brat. She spends half of her time asking for pity and the other half flaunting her superior status. What kind of a princess says things like, “Didn’t they know who I was, what they’d trained me for? I was Eadlyn Schreave. No one was more powerful than me”?
Catey F.
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