Caroline's Reviews > The Fall of Five

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My emotions pretty much reading this entire novel, hoping it would improve now that all the Garde were together and all that was left was to find Number 5 it was obvious once it was revealed he doesn't have his chest with him, it was leaving it open clear as freaking day that this was a trap and Number 5's actually a traitor and working with the enemy.

By this point, I'm team bad guy now - be done with this series, cuz Book One: I am Number Four was really good, it started off strong, Book 2: The Power of Six was ok, and Book 3: The Rise of Nine it started go downhill from there so I was really hoping that this book despite the title giving it away something suss is going on and that Number 5 is involved with it somehow and someway.

Not only that, the majority of these characters have been training with their individual Crepans' when it came to learning and controlling their individual Legacies but all this sitting around in Number Nine's apartment with the unnecessary chitchat and bonding time aka training was a complete waste of freaking time and energy!

The writing and pacing were just badly done in my opinion as again there are too many characters who the author has neglected to give any individual agency for them to stand apart from each other. Sadly they're getting lost on the page as one-dimensional characters with stereotypical personality traits and the "I am an alien on a mission to save our home planet and oh yeah stop the bad guys from invading Earth" trope.

Ok that's great but I wanna see more diversity since many of these characters have been hiding out all around the globe so I'm surprised not to see more diversity in terms of language and expression no instead they all sound American and understand American culture despite it being quite clear that many of them have only just arrived to America, it's just inconsistent and lazy writing.

The only one now I'm finding are somewhat marginally interesting is Ella and Adam. The rest I couldn't care less and I had such high hopes to see all the characters develop further but instead, I find myself bored and not caring about the characters and I feel that is partly due to the lack of character development both individually and as a group. Most of the time teens spend the majority of their time clueless and that's terrible for moving a story along.

Number Four/John: still don't get how and why the author is trying to push forward on how great of a leader he is, it's almost laughable, as repeatedly he has shown to be a selfish and incompetent leader - don't forget he chose his human girlfriend, leading his enemies to his friends' locations that caused his chest to be stolen and not only that caused his friends to be captured, imprisoned and tortured?!

Not only that at the end of the book, through dreams it was revealed that the Mogs were after Ella, and after having a vision showing a possible future of Ella ruling alongside the Mogs in suppressing humanity John CHOOSES to allow the ENEMY to take Ella and instead CHOSE to heal Sam's dad, ummm what?!?! Noooo!!! wrong choice, mate, he's not thinking with his head! He's letting emotions get the better of him! I find Number Four too immature and shortsighted to be a leader to make those hard life-and-death decisions as I don't think he's seeing the big picture and allowing sentiment to rule his decisions as this is a fight for not one world but two.

I wouldn't waste your time as NOTHING HAPPENS AT ALL which is maddening cuz the potential is there but it's being wasted.