Powerless, by Lauren Roberts

Paedyn Gray is a homeless orphan, surviving the slums of Ilya by thieving and hiding her great secret – a lack of an elite ability that is essential to be allowed to live in this country. Ordinaries have been declared diseased and are banished or killed, so Paedyn’s late father trained her powers of observation to pose as a psychic. When she saves the life of the King’s enforcer, Prince Kai, Paedyn is forced to compete in the five-yearly Elite trials, pitting her ‘psychic’ skills against those with super strength, super speed, and powers of illusion, kinesis and transformation. The secret sauce to great SF and fantasy is building a believable world, which then allows the reader to suspend disbelief about events that happen within it. The low quality ketchup underlying Powerless, combined with pedestrian writing, makes this poor man’s Hunger Games an increasingly tedious read. It’s full of explicit and gratuitous violence, with a ludicrously chaste love triangle. Powerless indeed.