Zeroes
Author(s): Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan, Deborah Biancotti
Genre: YA Sci-Fi
Published: September 2015 (Simon Impulse)
Rating: 
Synopsis: Don’t call them heroes.
But these six California teens have powers that set them apart.
Take Ethan, a.k.a. Scam. He’s got a voice inside him that’ll say whatever you want to hear, whether it’s true or not. Which is handy, except when it isn’t—like when the voice starts gabbing in the middle of a bank robbery. The only people who can help are the other Zeroes, who aren’t exactly best friends these days.
Enter Nate, a.k.a. Bellwether, the group’s “glorious leader.” After Scam’s SOS, he pulls the scattered Zeroes back together. But when the rescue blows up in their faces, the Zeroes find themselves propelled into whirlwind encounters with ever more dangerous criminals. At the heart of the chaos they find Kelsie, who can take a crowd in the palm of her hand and tame it or let it loose as she pleases.
I chose Zeroes for my AtoZ Challenge. It took a bit to get through even though I would switch between listening and reading the ebook depending on my hand availability. I don’t read a lot of young adult so I may have set myself up for failure on this one. Alas, the synopsis sucked me in and here we are.
The plot set up was interesting. Each of the members of the Zeroes were born in 2000 and each have special talents, or “super powers.” “Scam”, one of the main characters, is the catalyst for the whole story line after stealing a duffel bag of money from a drug runner, then “foiling” a bank robbery by convincing one of the robbers that the others are setting him up. Essentially, the rest of the story follows his group of former friends trying to save his ungrateful tail and finding a new addition to their team.
The authors of Zeroes allowed each of the main characters to have their own perspective chapters. There are six of them. The constant switching was exhausting. I would rather read one book dedicated to each character.
Overall, the story was well-written but I suspect I may have enjoyed Zeroes more if it hadn’t been directed towards the Young Adult crowd and employed fewer character perspectives. I have little patience for excessive angst (which seems to be a theme of YA) and “Scam” in particular grated on me. The narrator did a commendable job though, and even though it was fiction I didn’t mind listening to her. This premise may be interesting but I don’t plan on picking up the next in the series.
