Powerless Review: The Trial That Broke TikTok

The Trope Buffet That Somehow Still Works

I went into Powerless fully braced to roll my eyes, and I did roll them, more than once, and I still stayed up way too late finishing it. That’s the whole review in one sentence, honestly, but you’re here for more than one sentence so let’s talk about why a book built almost entirely out of spare parts from other books somehow still moves like it’s own thing.

Paedyn Gray, Thief Extraordinaire

Paedyn is an Ordinary faking her way through a kingdom that executes people like her, and I will always be a sucker for a protagonist who survives on wits instead of a magic superpower she was born special enough to deserve. She’s sharp, she’s guarded, she’s funny in the specific way people get funny when humor is armor rather than personality. The book leans hard into her competence, and it earns that lean. Where it gets shakier is the worldbuilding underneath her. Ilya’s power system and its politics feel sketched rather than built, more mood board than blueprint, and if you like your fantasy kingdoms with real infrastructure you may find yourself asking questions the text has no interest in answering.

Kai, Kitt, and the Discourse Around Them

Here’s the part everyone actually came for. Kai is the enemies-to-lovers love interest, a prince with a smirk problem and a genuine soft spot he does not want anyone to notice, and the slow burn between him and Paedyn is doing the heavy lifting for this entire book. The banter lands more often than not, the tension is real, and there’s a caretaking-after-injury dynamic that the fandom has rightfully turned into a whole personality. His brother Kitt complicates things, though calling it a full love triangle overstates it a little; Paedyn isn’t torn so much as aware, and the brothers’ loyalty to each other keeps it from curdling into a mess. Where I’ll push back is Kai himself. He’s charming in the way the book insists he’s charming, which isn’t always the same as actually being charming on the page, and a few of his bigger swoon moments read more performed than earned.

The Trial, the Twists, the Pacing

The competition structure gives the book its spine and its best action sequences, and Roberts knows how to end a chapter on a hook. But I won’t pretend the Hunger Games and Red Queen comparisons are unfair. This book knows exactly which trends it’s assembled from, and there are stretches, particularly in the back third, where the plot machinery grinds louder than the emotional one. It’s also not the cleanest prose you’ll read this year; there are rough patches that a harder edit would have smoothed out.

None of that stopped me from caring what happened to these people, and that’s the trick of it. Powerless isn’t reinventing YA fantasy. It’s remixing a genre’s greatest hits with real chemistry and a protagonist worth rooting for, and for a huge number of readers, myself included, that’s more than enough to make it work.