Normally I would be all over a book in which a pandemic kills most teenagers, leaves the survivors with psychic powers which are neatly categorized by color, and then throws them in concentration camps from which the narrator must escape and join the rebellion!
Every bit of that is my id. But this book was just meh. It wasn't bad. It wasn't great. It was just okay. Though the worldbuilding around the concentration camps didn't make a lot of sense, it wasn't spectacularly batshit like say The Fourth Wing. The colors assigned to powers were mostly non-intuitive, like green for extra-smart and blue for telekinetic, so I didn't find that interesting. The characters were okay.
Basically this book just could not begin to compete with the much higher-octane, more batshit, more dramatic, more OTT version of itself, which is The X-Men and many, many other comic books and manga/anime.
Every bit of that is my id. But this book was just meh. It wasn't bad. It wasn't great. It was just okay. Though the worldbuilding around the concentration camps didn't make a lot of sense, it wasn't spectacularly batshit like say The Fourth Wing. The colors assigned to powers were mostly non-intuitive, like green for extra-smart and blue for telekinetic, so I didn't find that interesting. The characters were okay.
Basically this book just could not begin to compete with the much higher-octane, more batshit, more dramatic, more OTT version of itself, which is The X-Men and many, many other comic books and manga/anime.