Powerless is Lauren Roberts’ debut novel. It is already a New York Times bestseller. Powerless is the first book in an unfinished trilogy, which will be followed by Reckless and Fearless.
Powerless is a fantasy novel that takes place in the kingdom of Ilya. Here, society is divided between the “powerful elites” and the “powerless ordinaries.” The elites are people who have power, and the ordinaries do not. There are also “mundanes,” which are people who fall in the middle, wielding power just not as strong as the elites and not as weak as the ordinaries. If you are an ordinary in Ilya, you are executed. Powerless follows an 18-year-old girl named Paedyn Gray who is an ordinary person, but has spent her whole life pretending she is a mundane with psychic abilities. Paedyn is homeless and lives with her best friend, Adena. Paedyn’s father was murdered by the king when she was young, and she never knew her mother. In the kingdom of llya, there are things called the trials (similar to The Hunger Games) that take place every year, and this year is special because the king’s next “enforcer” (basically his henchmen that does what he wants) Kai Azer, who is also the prince of llya, is going to be participating in the trials. To participate in the trials, you have to be chosen. Paedyn has to steal from people to survive, and at that, she’s pretty good at it. She decides she’s going to steal from this person, not knowing it is Kai, the future enforcer, and she successfully steals from him. Later that same day, she is walking down an alleyway and sees Kai being attacked by 5 elites. He normally could take them down, but among them, there was a silencer, which has the power to take away anyone’s powers and kill them. So she steps in and defeats them, which results in everyone wanting her in the trials. Paedyn doesn’t want to participate because she doesn’t have powers and doesn’t think she can win. She gets taken to the kingdom where she meets Kai, who is the heir to the throne, as well as Kai’s brother. The trials begin, and Kai and Paedyn start to fall for each other, but they can’t be together because they are competing against each other to win. There is a group rebelling against the king and all of the rules of the kingdom called the resistance, and they recruit Paedyn because the founder was her dad. The trials ended because the resistance came in. Paedyn technically wins, but to win, she had to kill Adena. The king wanted to hurt Paedyn and knew she wouldn’t kill her best friend (another contestant, Blair, ends up killing Adena). She goes to run away to the Dor (which is another kingdom nearby), but the king catches her and attacks her, trying to kill her; she ends up killing him instead. The book ends with Kai, and he vows revenge on Paedyn for killing the king and says he will spend the rest of his life hunting her.
There is some controversy with Lauren Roberts and if she “copied” Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard because some of the world building, character details, and plot are similar, and Lauren Roberts has come out and said she took inspiration from the book along with others, but never plagiarized it.
