BOOK REVIEW | Flawed by Cecelia Ahern

Genre: Young Adult Fiction/Dystopian

Publication Date: 24th March 2016

My Rating: ★★★.5

Goodreads Page

Goodreads Summary:

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 in which 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.

**No Spoilers**

I was sent a copy of this book from HarperCollins via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I was definitely interested in the concept of this book as I had heard it described as a cross between Divergent and The Scarlet Letter. The latter is one of my favourite books so I was very intrigued to see how the story would play out in a dystopian setting.

Although unique in some aspects of the book, it is quite similar to other YA dystopian novels: good girl who follows society's rules notices there's something wrong with the status quo, goes against it and is in trouble; a resistance against society comes to light; the girl  has a love interest who follows society and one who doesn't. Having said that, this is a great read. It's very fast-paced and I read most of it in one day. I liked the politics of the society and the reasons why it was, in itself, 'flawed'.

I did have some trouble with Celestine as a main character, I really didn't like  her dictionary definitions/preciseness of everything (to be honest, I'm very bored with the 'quirks' of YA protagonists where the do something that no other teenage would ever do). She also started to sound like Spock from Star Trek at times, saying things like 'It would be logical to finish' despite knowing that she could get seriously hurt and others would be affected or hurt by her actions. The start of the book was slightly repetitive with Celestine often repeating something from a couple of pages before. However, these things didn't take away from my overall enjoyment of the book.

 

I liked that this book wasn't particularly romance-heavy. In fact, the love interests are hardly in the book at all. I much prefer a slow-burn romance rather than the usual rush YA books tend to treat romances with. However, I didn't quite understand Celestine's attachment to Carrick. I would have preferred them to at least talk more than one word to one another throughout the book. I also really liked the direction the book was going in with the political side of things, where she no longer knows who she can trust. I also love the character of her grandpa - there was just so much character about him and he was very believable.

The Scarlet Letter aspects of the book were definitely my favourite and I liked that some of the situations were written as dark as they would be in real life; a lot of people would lightly write over some of the more disturbing scenes but Ahern successfully writes very vivid and dark scenes while maintaining the YA genre. I do wish we'd got to know some characters better, but there's definitely time for that , and more character development, in the next book.

I will definitely be picking up the next book in the series as I'm very interested to see where this book is going. If you're a fan of The Scarlet Letter or dystopian YA's then this is definitely for you, and I highly recommend picking this up when it comes out next month.