Out of nowhere, her parents disappear, and instead of waiting for an investigation like any normal person would do, Silver and her best friend, a boy named Butterfly (he's got wings), decide to throw their entire bright, promising, brilliant future as Elites away to go wander off to god knows where in order to search for them. An assassin, here in my lookout zone, and I was late, and I didn’t find him, and now he’s got a gun pointed at Tanaka!Right off the bat, the president dies (good fucking job, Silver), and Silver seeks to cover her ass. Oh gods, oh gods! she thought desperately. Silver swung back behind the parapet, stifling a gasp. She drank too much sake at a party the night before, oversleeps, and almost misses her job. Well, this 15-year old Elite soldier is on the assignment of her life, to be on guard for the president during his speech to the city. Neo-Babel, yeah! Our main character is Silver, a Chinese girl in Neo-Babel, supposedly discriminated against because of her ethnicity, despite her status as an 'Elite,' so chosen to be an elite soldier because of her superior DNA. After some vague catastrophic event called the Great Fall, it somehow survives from the ashes of other destroyed nations, and.that's it. The writing is solidly middle grade, and yet it was so difficult for me to read because the book simply did not hold my attention for all the reasons I listed above. Side characters have their own plot, and I find myself utterly unintrigued.

The dialogue is overdramatic, unbelievable, unnatural. The writing is dry, emotionless, at best. We have a plot that is confusing as hell, and actually, we have a book that is more action than plot.

We have a romance that is completely emotionless. This book was plagued with problems, along with the mess of the a dystopian city that is Neo-Babel, we have an unbelievable system of 'Elites' soldiers all of whom are young, ranging from ~10 to a their early 20s, which begs the question of 'where the fuck are the adult Elites?', we have two main characters who are completely lacking in any personality. No matter how strange, how new, how incredible this imagined world it, is has to be at the very least, credible, and I felt that the city of Neo-Babel in this book was poorly executed and depicted. The key to making a believable dystopian world is giving it some basis in reality.

The Elites by Natasha Ngan