Book Review: Court of Fives

TITLE: Court of Fives
Book 1 in the Court of Fives series
AUTHOR: Kate Elliott
PUBLISHED: August 18th, 2015
CATEGORY: YA
GENRE: Fantasy
PREMISE: A girl defies her father and social standing and winds up paying the price in more ways then one.
MY REVIEW: I've been wrestling with how I feel about this book for awhile. I don't hate it or anything. There's actually a lot to like about it. Like most of Little Brown's books, it's highly readable. I'm always impressed by LB's ability to find authors who write good entertaining romps. For all that this book is a tad cliche, it's mostly well done cliche if you will.
Because honestly, the cliche part is the major issue I have with it. It's just frankly, not that original. Dark fantasy's have been going around YA for awhile now. Particularly this past year or so thanks to things like The Winner's Trilogy and Red Queen. I feel like there's a contest or something going on to see who can claim the title of YA Game of Thrones. So really...there's nothing new here. It also doesn't help that the world building makes very little sense to me. Particularly where the sexism is concerned. Like, the rich people have sexism but the poor don't? How does that work? There are also a bunch of little things that made no sense. It was good for plot, but it made no sense.
Honestly, this was a entertaining but rough book. It had a lot of good ideas and again is readable. It's just the more you think about it, the more it just honestly is a bit of a mess. If you just read it as an entertaining romp though, and don't think about the details of it, it works well.
WHO SHOULD READ: Fantasy fans (who don't mind messy world building), The Winner's Trilogy fans, Red Queen fans
MY RATING: Three and a half out of Five shrugs