Zeroes By Scott Westerfeld (2015) Book Review

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I'll be doing the second part in my Disney Sing-Along Songs retrospective/overview series later today, but this morning I finished the book I was reading so I decided to do the book review I mentioned at the end of my She-Hulk: Attorney at Law episode 1 review. So today we are going to be talking about Zeroes, which is the first book in a trilogy by Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan, and Deborah Biancotti and was published in 2015. There will be spoilers for this book so if you're interested in reading it please do so before reading this review. Let's get into it.

I discovered this book because of Brad. He gave it to me because, while it wasn't quite his thing, he figured that I'd like it. Zeroes is about teenagers with superpowers. While it's labeled as a superhero book they aren't really superheroes in the sense that the characters in the book don't wear identity hiding costumes or masks. They do fight crime, kind of, but they don't wear the traditional superhero costumes and masks. 

The premise of the book is that a group of kids from Cambria, California, who were born in the year 2000, develop superpowers and come together as a group known as the Zeroes to train and help each other learn to control their powers because in each case each person's powers can be destructive. But when one of their own gets into trouble with the Russian mob, the Zeroes discover a new member, whose father is in deep. 

One of the things that drew me to this book is that it doesn't start at the beginning. It's not an origin story about how the group find each other and discover their powers. All of that happened many years before the opening chapter of the book. In fact the group has already split up due to one of them using their powers in a way that left all of them angry at him and splintered the group altogether. You don't usually get that with books like this. Normally when it's the first book in the series, it's the FIRST book in the series, with no story having come before it. But the way that Westerfeld, Lanagan, and Biancotti wrote it, the world presented in this story feels so much more fleshed out than if the backstory had simply been the Zeroes coming together for the first time or if the book had been about them coming together for the first time.

So you might be wondering who the Zeroes are right? Well there are six of them. Nataniel Saldana/Bellwether, Riley Phillips/Flicker, Chizara Okeke/Crash, Thibault Durant/Anonymous, Ethan Cooper/Scam, and the newest member of the team, Kelsie Laszlo/Mob. Nate has the power to bring people under his leadership with friendship, Riley is blind but can use other people's eyes to see the world around her, Chizara has the ability to crash any electronic system connected through the internet, Thibault has the ability to disappear and make people forget he exists, Ethan's powers are utilized with a second voice within him that automatically knows things about people, including their deepest and darkest secrets, and Kelsie has the ability to affect the emotions of a crowd of people either positively or negatively depending on the situation.

I think my favourite characters, at least so far, are Riley and Thibault because they're both different than the rest. Riley is blind and relies on others to get around, and people forget Thibault entirely. His parents even forgot that he was in the hospital and so they never visited him. As someone who spent alot of time in the hospital when I was a kid, I can sympathize with Thibault even though my parents never ever forgot me at the hospital. 

Nate kind of reminds me of Charles Xavier, minus the telepathy and the wheelchair/hoverchair. He formed the Zeroes with some Ultimate Goal that keeps getting mentioned throughout the book, but it's never revealed in the chapters that focus on him. And of course, he keeps it a secret from the rest of the team. It's probably not anything sinister, but you never know with these kinds of leader characters.

Chizara's storyline in this book is also interesting. She is a deeply moral person and refuses to use her powers in ways that could hurt people, but never refuses to help the others when they REALLY need her. Like when they went to the police station to try to rescue Ethan or when they try to rescue Ethan, Kelsie, and Kelsie's dad, Jerry, since the Russian mobsters put them in a building that's about to be demolished. Over the course of the book she learns how to fix the things she destroys. 

This book explores superpowers in a way that no comic book has ever done. In a way it reminds me of Animorphs a little bit because that series also attempted to explore superpowers and the morality of using them without harming innocent people through how the Animorphs used their morphing abilities. Though the Zeroes fight crime, not an alien invasion. 

I love this book. Though my biggest problem with it is that the chapters are pretty short, and there's alot of them. I think the book could've combined chapters that focus on the same character, because the total number of chapters in this book is 84, which makes this the longest book I have ever read in terms of the number of chapters it has.

That's all I have to say about Zeroes. I have the complete trilogy in a box set recently, so I'll be starting book 2 ASAP as I've never read it before and I'm excited to read the further adventures of the Zeroes. In the meantime I'll be back shortly with Part 2 of my Disney Sing-Along Songs overview series. So until then have a great rest of the day and I'll talk to you later. Take care.