Review: Select // Had Me Hooked From Page One

By Marit Weisenberg

Rating: 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

Goodreads Community Rating: 3.59

Genre: YA Fantasy

Publication Date: October 3rd, 2017

Format Read: Ebook

Goodreads Summary: Coming from a race of highly-evolved humans, Julia Jaynes has the perfect life. The perfect family. The perfect destiny. But there’s something rotten beneath the surface—dangerous secrets her father is keeping; abilities she was never meant to have; and an elite society of people determined to keep their talents hidden and who care nothing for the rest of humanity. So when Julia accidentally disrupts the Jaynes’ delicate anonymity, she’s banished to the one place meant to make her feel inferior: public high school.

Julia’s goal is to lay low and blend in. Then she meets him—John Ford, tennis prodigy, all-around good guy. When Julia discovers a knack for reading his mind, and also manipulating his life, school suddenly becomes a temporary escape from the cold grip of her manipulative father. But as Julia’s powers over John grow, so do her feelings. For the first time in her life, Julia begins to develop a sense of self, to question her restrictive upbringing and her family prejudices. She must decide: can a perfect love be worth more than a perfect life? 

Overview

This book is super hard to explain. On the one hand, I’m a bit overwhelmed by Julia Jaynes and everything that she is/does/feels, but on the other hand, when I think about it, nothing actually HAPPENED in this book. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, you might want to turn away. But for some reason, it drew me in, and I forgot that we had literally only gone back and forth to school for the last 3 chapters.

This book felt very quintessential teen angsty, but I loved the concept, and felt like Julia was made more intriguing because of her constant distress and inability to make a decision and stick to it.

Oh, also… this is eventually going to become a series.

Characters

Julia Jaynes. If the name doesn’t tip you off about what type of book it’s going to be immediately, you probably haven’t been reading enough young adult lit. Julia is a member of a secret species of non-humans, which essentially means that she’s invincible. she can run faster, jump higher, be smarter, think faster, pretty much everything. Her and her family are uber rich, and live among all the other normal people

but in the world of everything, Julia is… different. She looks different, isn’t allowed to be in the “special” group, and pretty much behaves totally unlike everyone else. This gives her a lot of self confidence issues, and she seems pretty clingy to literally every boy she meets who shows an iota of interest in her. that’s my least favorite part of Julia –> if she didn’t have a boy on her arm at every second, she would be nothing.

I think my semi-distast for Julia colored my perception for the book, but I still think that she was a real person who acted as such, and so i suppose some people might find her more relatable than I do.

Plot

Ugh the tropes kill me. There was a love triangle, girl against familial concept, girl against world, all that type of stuff.

but at the same time, it was intriguing. There was so much going on in her family that we just wouldn’t hear about, and instead Julia would just live her normal life, and then BOOM hit with a change. I think that’s why I sort of liked it. Even though Julia was sort of rebelling against everything she ever knew, she still wasn’t really responsible for doing anything. Her parents/people around her would be the one that made the changes, and she’d just have to deal with what came out of it. It reminded me of real life.

I also suspect that in future books in this series Julia will be a lot more hero-y so watch out.

 

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Writing Style

There was super good pacing to this book, and somehow I never got bored. The author knew when a little extra drama needed to be added, and when it would be normal for another conflict/solution pair to arise. There were lots of little issues that all connected to the big issue, which is something that I enjoy when I’m reading.

The writing wasn’t remarkable, but it also wasn’t annoyingly juvenile, so I think it’s the perfect mix!

Summary

After writing this review, I’m very unsure how I gave this a 4 star to begin with. Clearly I’m not giving it enough credit as it deserves. Basically, I think it was a pretty good idea and I read it quickly because it drew me in, but there was nothing particularly special about it.

If you read fast, and a lot of YA, I think you’ll probably enjoy the book and it will be worth your time, but it’s not something I would suggest if it’s outside of your typical genre.

Disclaimer: Special Thanks to Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book to review!

Have you read Select? Would you recommend it? What are other good YA Fantasy recommendations?

 

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