Book Review – Valiant

 

Thank you to netgalley and Entangled Teen for the review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Book: Valiant by Merrie Destefano
Release Date:  December 4th 2018
Tags:  Science Fiction / Sci-Fi / Young Adult / Aliens / Alien Invasion / Violence / Time Travel

The Valiant was supposed to save us. Instead, it triggered the end of the world.
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Earth is in shambles. Everyone, even the poorest among us, invested in the Valiant’s space mining mission in the hopes we’d be saved from ourselves. But the second the ship leaves Earth’s atmosphere, our fate is sealed. The alien invasion begins. They pour into cities around the world through time portals, possessing humans, forcing us to kill one another.
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And for whatever reason, my brother is their number one target.
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Now the fate of the world lies in the hands of me, a seventeen-year-old girl, but with the help of my best friend, Justin―who’s suddenly starting to feel like more―maybe if we save my brother, we can save us all

A book with a gorgeous cover and an interesting plot where we need to save one person that will save us all. I love those kinds of plots. Unfortunately I did not get a whole lot more from this book than this. I rarely rate books 1 star, and it feels harsh, but I didn’t enjoy any part of this book and I would be lying if I did. I only finished this as it is an arc and it was only 160 pages on my ereader.

The book starts us off with a prologue where our main character Sara, tells us about the invasion, about being contacted by one of the aliens who is in the resistance and how she accepts his help to save her brother. She went through 14 time travels where she failed. Than we get thrown into the story.

At that point I became confused because we got so little on the world building. This story is set in our future and apparently we are doing pretty bad because of another depression. But I’d like a bit more than that. There are also all kinds of technology that get thrown at us and that doesn’t really get explained all that well. Like skintags. I have no grasp on this future of us and since it isn’t too far into the future you’d think filling in the blanks for us wouldn’t be so hard.

The valiant, the ship that goes that launches on the day of the invasion, apparently triggers the invasion. How? Why? No answers. We know nothing of the Valiant except that it launched. But it is the title of the book…  Why does Sara’s brother need to be saved? Where is the rest of the resistance? What does the Xua want? What did we do that they want to kills us all? How does the time travelling work? I have so many questions and I got answers to none of them.

Adding onto that, I don’t think the writing was stellar. There is a lot of tell and no show, the whole prologue being a prime example of that. It tries to be action packed but I was bored throughout reading the entire book. Romance also takes  a bit of a centre stage but there was no real chemistry on the page. I didn’t care for any of the characters because they were so flat.

I could go on but this book needs a LOT of work to work. However I will say that I seem to be the odd one out here and there are a lot of positive reviews for this book on goodreads.