The Renegades are a syndicate of prodigies — humans with extraordinary abilities — who emerged from the ruins of a crumbled society and established peace and order where chaos reigned. As champions of justice, they remain a symbol of hope and courage to everyone… except the villains they once overthrew. Nova has a reason to hate the Renegades, and she is on a mission for vengeance. As she gets closer to her target, she meets Adrian, a Renegade boy who believes in justice — and in Nova. But Nova’s allegiance is to a villain who has the power to end them both.I have to be honest: I 100% picked up Renegades because of its cover. That muted blue and gray color palette, the minimalist character drawings, the unrecognizable cityscape… I just had to know more. The plot – which is your standard good vs. evil revenge tale featuring super-powered individuals – feels like it’s been done before, but in Marissa Meyer’s hands, the characters jump off the page and creep into your subconscious and you find yourself reading late into the night because you need answers. Some of the twists were softball throws, detected chapters in advance, but then others were a fastpitch to the stomach, leaving me capslocks-rage-tweeting an hour after I should have been in bed. (It was so good, y’all; I gobbled down 500+ pages in under a week.) Perhaps if I had known that Renegades was merely the first in a planned trilogy, I wouldn’t have read the book so soon after it was published, but now I have not one but TWO sequels to look forward to. (The second book, Archenemies, drops in November.) Meyer is perhaps best known for her young-adult cyborg series the Lunar Chronicles, but even if you’ve never heard of that, Renegades deserves to be read on its own merits.
