English Blonde: Book Review: The Rose Society by Marie Lu

Hey my lovelies, welcome to this weeks book review and it is The Rose Society by Marie Lu. Last week I reviewed The Young Elites, so if you haven't read that yet, I recommend you do now. As this book review will contain spoilers for The Young Elite.

Title: The Rose Society
Author: Marie Lu
Publisher: Penguin
Pub. Date: October 13th 2015
Date Read: 11th April 2017
Pages: 397
Rating: 4.5/5 stars
Summary: Once upon a time, a girl had a father, a prince, a society of friends. Then they betrayed her, and she destroyed them all. Adelina Amouteru’s heart has suffered at the hands of both family and friends, turning her down the bitter path of revenge. Now known and feared as the White Wolf, she flees Kenettra with her sister to find other Young Elites in the hopes of building her own army of allies. Her goal: to strike down the Inquisition Axis, the white-cloaked soldiers who nearly killed her. But Adelina is no heroine. Her powers, fed only by fear and hate, have started to grow beyond her control. She does not trust her newfound Elite friends. Teren Santoro, leader of the Inquisition, wants her dead. And her former friends, Raffaele and the Dagger Society, want to stop her thirst for vengeance. Adelina struggles to cling to the good within her. But how can someone be good when her very existence depends on darkness?

Overview

The Rose Society picks up with Adelina and Violetta escaping Kenettra and traveling in an attempt to find more malfettos and get their own version of the Young Elites.

Rose Society is the perfect example of a tumblr post I once read for a writing prompt. You follow the hero, only to find out at the end that they are in fact the villain.

Writing

I do wonder if Marie Lu decided to do three point of views in order to do the whole "Three sides to every story. Their side. Your side. The truth' sort of thing.

The only thing that I kind of feel after reading both this and the final book in the trilogy is I honestly feel like we could have finished the book there and kept it a duology, rather than the expansion into the next book.

Characters

Adelina began to embrace her dark side a lot more in this novel. From the beginning you could just tell there was going to be a lot of conflict between the sisters from the very beginning of the book. Because honestly Violetta is so self righteous. She says that she is only looking out for Adelina but everything she does has some sort of detrimental effect on her sister.

Teren is such a love struck fool, like what an idiot. Has he honestly still not realised that the reason for Guilettas obsession for malfettos is because of her brother, and the weird hierarchy for the throne. Although he did start going against his dear beloved, and growing a back bone, even if it wasn't necessarily in the way I wanted him too, but at least he stood for his values.

Even though of cause The Rose Society has three main characters, but I don't really have anything to say about Rafaelle, I didn't really enjoy him as a character and I don't really care for him.

A lot of new characters were introduced in the Rose Society and some that I liked a lot more than others. As we met Magiano (my personal favourite), Sergio and of cause Queen Maeve, who we met mildly in book one. **Spoiler ahead** I found it really interesting that they added Sergio 'the weather manipulator' into the mix. As the Young Elite did say that they had killed him due to him not being in control. **End of spoiler**

Conclusion

In conclusion, I really enjoyed the Rose Society, only wishing that we delved into Guiletta's character a bit more. But after finishing reading this I am ready to move on to the next book, The Midnight Star.

Recommend...

I recommend this to fans of YA fantasy, and of cause fans of the first novel, because in my opinion it got better. As I said in my last review I would recommend this series to fans of the Red Queen series by Victoria Aveyard, Throne of Glass series by Sarah J Maas and And I Darken by Kiersten White. And I Darken due to Adelina being a strong anti- hero. Red Queen due to the magical powers aspect and Throne of Glass because of the violence and the magic aspect again.