Zeroes Review

Zeroes review: superpowers become problems of consent and group behavior

This Zeroes review argues that the collaboration among Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan, and Deborah Biancotti is most distinctive when power cannot be separated from other people. Six California teenagers possess abilities involving persuasive speech, crowds, attention, electronic systems, and borrowed sight. They once operated together under the name Zeroes, but the group fractured before the novel begins. Ethan, known as Scam, triggers a crisis when the voice that speaks through him intervenes around a bank robbery. Nate, or Bellwether, gathers the scattered team, and Kelsie—Mob—enters a conflict already shaped by old loyalty and mistrust.

This is not a story about isolated gifts waiting for heroic purpose. Each ability raises a social question. If a voice tells someone exactly what they want to hear, who consented? If a leader influences a group, where does coordination end and control begin? The action is fast, but the novel's strongest engine is ethical instability.

A broken team is more interesting than a clean origin

The Zeroes have history when readers meet them. Friendships, grievances, roles, and failures already exist, so reunion does not automatically restore solidarity. This choice avoids the predictable sequence in which strangers discover powers, test them, and become a harmonious unit.

Past cohesion may itself have been compromised. Bellwether's leadership ability affects groups, which means memories of good teamwork cannot be treated as neutral evidence that everyone freely agreed. The novel turns nostalgia into a question: did the team function because members trusted Nate, because his power aligned them, or because both were true?

Starting after the breakup also distributes exposition through conflict. Characters reveal what happened by disagreeing about it. The reader must assemble the group from partial accounts rather than accept an official team narrative.

The tradeoff is density. Six protagonists, aliases, powers, and relationships arrive quickly. Readers who prefer one stable viewpoint may need patience before the ensemble becomes legible.

Scam's voice makes useful speech morally untrustworthy

Ethan's power is a separate-seeming voice capable of saying what a listener most wants or needs to hear. It can produce information and persuasion beyond Ethan's conscious knowledge. That makes it extraordinarily effective and deeply humiliating.

The voice can rescue him from danger, but it can also speak without his permission and exploit another person's vulnerabilities. Ethan benefits from words he does not fully control while remaining responsible for consequences attached to his mouth. The ambiguity makes him difficult to like and difficult to dismiss.

The bank-robbery crisis demonstrates how quickly verbal power can escalate. A sentence alters behavior, but Ethan cannot reliably predict the network of reactions. His nickname, Scam, captures both ability and social judgment. People know that interaction with him may be manipulated even when he wants to be sincere.

The novel's ethical intelligence appears here. A useful outcome does not cleanse a coercive method, and lack of full control does not erase harm. Ethan's arc depends on learning responsibility without pretending his power is simple agency.

Bellwether reveals the danger inside charismatic leadership

Nate can guide and synchronize groups, making him the obvious organizer. In an action narrative, that ability looks almost purely beneficial. Teams need coordination, especially when every member's power can create chaos.

Yet Bellwether's effect destabilizes consent. If people feel unified around him, can they distinguish chosen loyalty from influence? Nate may believe sincerely in the group's purpose while underestimating how his presence shapes agreement.

This makes him more compelling than a conventional team captain. Leadership is neither fraudulent nor innocent. The novel asks whether ethical use requires constant restraint, transparency, and willingness to hear dissent outside the field of one's own charisma.

Readers can see why the Zeroes need him and why they might need distance from him. That double truth supports the fractured-team premise and gives interpersonal scenes stakes equal to confrontations with criminals.

Flicker and Anonymous turn perception into dependence

Flicker cannot see through her own eyes but can access the vision of people around her. Her power creates extraordinary tactical range while making perception relational. What she sees depends on available viewpoints, their direction, and the bodies carrying them.

This design avoids presenting disability only as lack or magical cure. Her ability does not restore conventional sight; it creates a different visual system with strengths, overloads, and dependence. The narrative gains unusual action scenes because space can be assembled from several moving perspectives.

Anonymous has an opposite social problem: people fail to notice or remember him. What looks useful for stealth becomes an assault on durable relationship. Recognition must constantly be rebuilt, and absence can occur while he is physically present.

Together, these abilities show why the book's powers are not decorations. Perception and acknowledgment are social resources. One character experiences too many borrowed eyes; another cannot reliably remain in anyone's attention.

Crash makes technology an emotional environment

Crash can affect electronic systems, giving her immense disruptive potential in a world organized through devices. The power is practical in action and isolating in daily life. Proximity, stress, and control matter because ordinary technology can become collateral damage.

Her ability turns infrastructure into part of characterization. Phones, vehicles, surveillance, communication, and security are not neutral tools around the plot. They respond to a teenager whose emotional state has material reach.

The novel uses this for cinematic set pieces, but the deeper question concerns self-trust. How can someone participate in ordinary life when anxiety may break the systems others depend on? Control cannot be learned only in private because the power's consequences are public.

Readers interested in technological speculation can browse science-fiction reviews. Zeroes stays focused on adolescent relation rather than explaining a complete scientific mechanism.

Mob makes crowds feel like living weather

Kelsie's relation to crowds expands the scale of the book. She senses and influences collective emotion, treating a mass of people as something with currents, pressure, and momentum. A bank-robbery setting gives that ability immediate stakes because fear can spread faster than deliberate instruction.

Mob's power complicates individualistic superhero assumptions. A crowd is not merely background civilians waiting to be rescued. It becomes an active system whose mood can protect, stampede, conceal, or destroy.

Her entrance also changes the existing team. The Zeroes have established roles, while Kelsie brings an ability adjacent to Bellwether's but not identical. Questions of leadership and belonging become unavoidable.

The crowd sequences are among the novel's clearest achievements. They make social psychology physical without reducing every person to sameness. The power works through tendency and amplification, leaving room for unpredictability.

Collaborative authorship suits the rotating viewpoints

Three authors writing an ensemble novel could produce tonal fragmentation. Here the collaboration generally supports multiplicity. Different viewpoint characters have distinct concerns, and no single member fully owns the team's meaning.

The rotating structure allows the same event to change under another perspective. Scam may understand a verbal intervention as survival, while someone harmed by it experiences violation. Bellwether sees necessary coordination where another member senses pressure.

This method is thematically apt because the book distrusts unitary accounts of groups. A team narrated by one leader would reproduce the hierarchy under examination.

The cost is uneven attachment. Readers will inevitably prefer some Zeroes, and the rapid switching can interrupt the momentum of a favorite strand. The novel asks for investment in a system before every individual has equal depth.

Action is cinematic, sometimes at the expense of aftermath

The bank robbery and its expanding consequences provide chases, criminal danger, public chaos, and opportunities for powers to interact. The authors stage abilities so that one solution creates another problem, a strong principle for ensemble action.

Movement keeps the long book accessible, but pace can compress emotional consequence. Manipulation, betrayal, and frightening loss of control sometimes need more quiet than the plot permits. The trilogy format promises later development while leaving this volume to establish momentum.

The prose is direct and visually oriented. Readers who enjoy adaptation-ready sequences will likely respond. Those seeking stylistic experimentation or slow psychological realism may find the treatment broad.

A comparison with Red Rising review shows another young ensemble shaped by hierarchy and violent action, though the settings, voice, and political scale differ greatly.

Reader fit, content, and series commitment

Zeroes best suits teens and adults comfortable with large casts, aliases, shifting viewpoints, moral friction, and a trilogy that leaves some arcs open. It is particularly attractive to readers tired of powers defined only by combat strength.

Content includes criminal violence, firearms, crowd panic, manipulation, coercive influence, injury, and teenagers placed in severe danger. Romantic and friendship tensions also intersect with abilities, making consent an important concern.

Readers who want a complete standalone resolution should know this is the first volume. The immediate crisis develops substantially, but the team and wider premise are designed to continue.

The young adult collection offers more intimate single-protagonist alternatives. Choosing this novel means accepting the mess of a group whose members may not agree on whether they should exist as a group.

Final assessment: teamwork is the most dangerous power

The book's title suggests people who are not conventional heroes, and that refusal matters. The Zeroes can do extraordinary things, but ability does not supply virtue, unity, or public legitimacy. Some powers are inherently invasive; others make ordinary life painful; all require context.

The collaborative form, fractured history, and relational abilities give the novel a strong identity within crowded superhero fiction. Its weaknesses—busy setup, uneven focus, and deferred development—come partly from the same ensemble ambition.

The final value lies in a question larger than whether the teens can stop a crisis. Can they create rules that protect one another from the powers meant to protect them? Bellwether can unite, Scam can persuade, Mob can move crowds, and the others can alter perception or systems. None of that guarantees consent. Zeroes becomes compelling when it recognizes that a team is not heroic because it acts together. It is heroic only if its members can still choose who they are while doing so.