Flawed by Cecelia Ahern
Series: Flawed #1
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
The Scarlet Letter meets Divergent in this thoughtful and thrilling novel by bestselling author Cecelia Ahern.
Celestine North lives a perfect life. She’s a model daughter and sister, she’s well-liked by her classmates and teachers, and she’s dating the impossibly charming Art Crevan.
But then Celestine encounters a situation where she makes an instinctive decision. She breaks a rule. And now faces life-changing repercussions.
She could be imprisoned. She could be branded. She could be found FLAWED.
I am girl of definitions, of logic, of black and white.
Remember this.
And she’s just as boring and spiritless as that quote indicates. This book is dull, bland, and yet another prime example of failed YA dystopia. It was inoffensive, if you can call, a nonsensical dystopian future and a standard love triangle inoffensive, among its other faults.
I can’t stop using the word bland. It was so bland. It is so flavorless. Have you ever had plain instant oatmeal? It’s kind of like that. Only instead of taking a few bite and throwing it away, you’re forced to read 250 pages of it. The main character is perfect in a flawed world. She considers herself intelligent. Reasonable. Rational. Her narrative voice puts me to sleep.
She thinks I’m a know-it-all, which she has told me plenty of times, and I try not to be one with her. I know I have a habit of correcting people’s grammar or recounting dictionary definitions, but that’s just me. Doing it does not make me feel I am better than the person I am saying it to. It is just an expression of who I am.
Her name is Celestine. I think we all know a Celestine. She’s the pastel-twin-set-wearing, church-going, grammar-correcting, non-swearing, quarterback-dating ASB president who does all her homework on time and always has the correct answers when she’s called on. She is inoffensively perfect.
Don’t you just hate those types? I know I shouldn’t, but I’m imperfect, and I do. I need humanity. I need passions. I need emotions. I need to burst out laughing and let out a “fuck” every once in awhile, and I enjoy similar company. This book, this main character, for me, was nigh unbearable.
And that’s not even mentioning the atrocious joke of this dystopian future. In the future, we all have to be perfect. Cause our leaders fucked up and plunged our country into a depression and economic failure, we force everyone to be perfect. If they’re not, they’re put on trial and branded with a Scarlet-Letter-like “F” which doesn’t stand for fuck, but Flawed!.
So if you’re imperfect, if you mess up in any way, you’re screwed. Cheating? Nope. Lying? You’re a goner.
…branded a celebrity who’d made millions on the sale of her fitness DVD but was discovered as having a secret tummy tuck.
Like, REALLY? Does that make sense to anyone? Who here has not sinned, let he cast the first stone. I’m not perfect. In a single day, I’ve probably committed a multitude of sins.Gluttony (I’M GOING TO EAT ALL THE COOKIES), lust (god, look at the ass on that guy doing deadlifts), greed (I really want a pay raise), sloth (I have done nothing productive all day), wrath (WTF THAT BITCH TOTALLY TOOK MY SPOT AT THE GYM), envy (ugh, I wish I had bigger boobs like her), pride (goddamn I’m so smart I scare myself sometime)…etc.
….Wait, that’s all of them, huh?! Fuck! I’m so screwed.
But anyway, does that make sense to anyone? How freaking impossible to enforce that? Who would even want to live in a world like that? Sinning and making mistakes is fun, guys! And we have never, ever, EVER been able to hold our governmental leaders responsible for their idiocy, and I don’t think we can in another version of the future. This book’s premise is just silly.
Oh, and there’s a love triangle. Between Celestine’s childhood friend who is perfect and whom she adores above all others. He’s known her for years. They were friends before lovers. He’s wealthy, powerful, adoring. And they’re in Twoo Wuv.
I watch him, his mean, tough, bold face, and will him to look at me. I wonder what he has done. It can’t be a criminal act or he wouldn’t be here, but it must have been close. Whatever he has been accused of doing, I have no doubt that he has done it.
He looks up at me once he steps into his cell and sees me through the transparent wall we share. My heart flips. Contact with somebody, for the first time in hours. But as quickly as he sees me, he looks away again and strides with his long, lean legs and sits with his back flat against the transparent divide, so that all I can see are his back muscles, rippling through his soiled T-shirt.
Well, that is, until she meets the Hot Bad Boy. So generic.
All quotes were taken from an uncorrected proof subject to change in the final edition.
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