Powerless (novel)

Powerless is a fantasy romance novel written by American author Lauren Roberts. It was published on 30 January 2023 in the US. Roberts originally self-published the book to Barnes & Noble Press and Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing services. This novel is the first book in the five part book series. Roberts originally began to write Powerless when she was 18 years old. Her books have sold over five million copies over the world.

Plot

This novel follows a girl called Paedyn, who is a ordinary, a person without powers. In the Kingdom of Ilya, where Paedyn lives, society is spilt into two categories, Elites and Ordinaries. Elites are powerful and treated with respect while the Ordinaries are treated like vermin, like they don't belong anywhere.

The king of Ilya believes the Ordinaries are abnormal and would ruin the Kingdom's reputation. Every year, the kingdom of Ilya holds a series of competitions called 'The trials'. In these 'trials', all the Elites battle each other to see who is the strongest and would come out on top. Paedyn saves the king's life and now becomes known as the 'Sliver Saviour'. And all of a sudden, she is chosen to compete in these so called 'trials'. She has to fake being an Elite and try to survive the trials and somehow win.

TV adaptions

A television series adaptation of the Powerless series is in the works by the company Amazon.

Awards and honours

The book series Powerless received the Barnes and Noble YA (Young adult fiction) Award in 2023. It was also selected for the Goodreads Choice Award for best Young Adult Fantasy and Science Fiction in the year of 2023. It is also a New York Times bestseller for 19 weeks, and topped the Australia top 10 YA, young adult fiction), bestseller chart for several weeks. It was the highest selling children's title in the Australia book market for one week.

Audiobooks

The first book in the pentalogy, (a five part book series), Powerless had an audiobook version released on 20 July, 2023. It is narrated by Chase Brown and Cecily Bednar Schmidt. It is in total, about 17 hours and 45 minutes long.

Writing

Roberts finished writing the novel, 'Powerless', in only three months of beginning to write it. She began to write The New York bestseller's when she was only 18 years old.

In a interview, Lauren Roberts talks about her inspiration that helped her to write the novel, 'Powerless'. She states she began writing it because of her strong passion of reading. But, there were more factors involved as well as to how she wrote her novel.

Growing up, I was obsessed with writing, but it was one of those things where I never thought it was in the cards for me, because I always thought … it’s so difficult to get your foot in the door and pursue a passion.' Lauren states in the interview.

And so I was 18, and I remembered reading all these amazing books but thinking, ‘oh, I wish there was this in this book,’ or ‘I wish it had an element of this aspect or this trope.'.

Her mind wondered and worked nonstop. She wanted to write a type of book that she always wanted to read before.

'One day, I had a shower thought,” Roberts says. 'It was nothing profound, but I really thought, what if I do an ‘Uno reverse card’ on the chosen one trope, and instead of our main character being the one to find these powers and save the kingdom … she’s the only one who’s powerless and is surrounded by people who do have these abilities? That was the first little nugget of inspiration.' She adds.

She took to social media to see what others thought. She explained that she had amassed a little family on TikTok of fellow readers whom all adored the same types of book genres and tropes. After the idea of Powerless came to her, she went on a TikTok live to see what her followers thought of the idea and was met with a lot of support and love.

When I was 18, as I was writing every scene, I would go on social media and ‘promote’ it, in a way, and I would read the scenes to them.' Roberts comments. 'I called them ‘bedtime stories,’ and I read different scenes or took different lines, freshly, as I’d written them.' She says.

Roberts also said:

I wrote Powerless when I was 18 — and obviously I’m not too much older now — but there are so many things that I would go back and do differently now.