I remember when Flawed was announced. Patrick Ness tweeted about it. “It’s about a dystopian future where perfection is... oh god I’m dead,” he said. Stepping past the fact that he and Cecelia Ahern appeared on a YA panel a couple of weeks before, he did have a point. From the off, Flawed seemed like an awkward novel, boring at the least, derivative at worst.
Fortunately, it is a novel that rises above its unoriginal premise and becomes something unique. Ahern is trying to make a point about how quick humankind are to blame and the pitfalls of modern day public shaming. It evokes The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and while it and Flawed are leagues apart in quality, it’s an interesting modern day adaption, even if it was unintentional. Where The Scarlet Letter’s Hester Prynne was shamed for adultery, Flawed’s Celestine North is shamed for helping a dying man and promptly banged up for her supposedly faulty judgement.
Flawed packs in plenty of interesting ideas but they’re smothered by inelegant dialogue and a protagonist that just isn’t particularly appealing. Celestine aspires for perfection and while she does undergo something of a journey, she starts off as someone far too irritating and bland to root for. Likewise, the heterosexual love triangle that blossoms (read ‘is shoehorned’) around her is equally dull and it feels like it was stitched together by a committee. It’s nice to see a bi-racial heroine but Flawed isn’t very inclusive and feels, for the most part, like a painful hammering together of early 2010s YA tropes. Given how spoilt we are in terms of high quality, diverse YA nowadays, Flawed just seems like a step backwards.
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