To be clear, this was a highly anticipated read for me, and while I was expecting to like it, I was not expecting to have overwhelmingly strong feelings on it.
I tend to be wary of dystopian type books because I tend to end up being very underwhelmed by the genre the majority of the time. Perhaps because I have high expectations from previous books I’ve loved, perhaps because I find they tend to fall flat. Silver Elite was the anomaly for me, making me fall in love with the story itself, the characters, even somehow the world despite its awful segregating premise. The amount I loved and felt so strongly for multiple characters was the major clincher for me because I did not expect to feel so strongly for them.
There’s Wren herself who I was so surprised to feel a bond with from the outset. I connected to both her positive traits, and even her negative personality traits and loved her so much as a main character. She’s frustrating at times, with her recklessness and her arrogance, but somehow these aspects of her never negatively impacted my view of her and only made her more human and flawed. She’s also strong as all hells, emotionally distant because of what she is, a modified, and the fact that this makes it impossible to fully trust anyone because it could result in her losing her freedom or even her death. I was rooting her on the entire time, hoping she wouldn’t be caught as an “aberrant”, wanting her to succeed in her program despite the conflict it entailed, and also of course for the romance side of the story.
But there were others besides Wren who I ended up adoring. There’s Cross, the blue-eyed, stoic, incredibly appealing Captain who Wren cannot stay away from despite how conflicted she feels about him. There’s Kaine, flirtatious and such a golden boy who I was so surprised by. When I say I loved this man immediately and couldn’t get enough of his scenes with Wren, I mean it. I was so taken in by him despite how much I adored Cross and wanted him to be endgame for Wren and with my uncertainty of Kaine’s role in the beginning on account of how much he clearly liked Wren. But regardless of that and in the interest of avoiding spoilers I won’t confirm or deny how relationships turn out, I adored Kaine as well and thought he and Wren had such a pure and wonderful friendship with each other throughout the program, and the fact that they were so similar was worth so many golden moments. And I also can’t forget to mention gruff uncle Jim who was somehow so hard not to love. Wolf was another instant love, as infrequently as he shows up throughout the book on account of the fact that he’s Wren’s telepathic best friend, someone she connected with as a child and has never actually met, nor does she know his real name. Their interactions were so sweet and heartfelt despite knowing so little personal details about one another in a world where mods can’t fully trust anyone else.
I was also shocked by the moments that ended up being so heartfelt for myself. I did not expect to have genuine emotional moments reading this book, yet I was saddened by moments that hit me so hard and had me teary, frustrated by other moments and characters, anxious during moments of high tension where I didn’t know the outcome, etc. There was a whole gambit of emotions I felt and I both couldn’t stop reading this book and was prematurely sad about it being over. I’m so excited for the sequel because I need more of these characters and this world, and I’m desperate to see where things might end up.
To sum it up I absolutely need the next book ASAP. The very ending is a rush of intensity with so much that happens all at once and adds a ton of tension to characters circumstances followed by a giant bomb being stopped on the very last page that had me sitting silently for a moment with my mouth agape as I tried to process what I’d just learned. So essentially WOW. What a phenomenal book and I can only hope the series continues to blow me away.
