A couple months ago, I was perusing Netflix and they recommended this show The 100 for me and after hearing so many great things about it from some friends I started to watch it. I caught up with both seasons right before the season 2 finale so needless to say I am obsessed. When I found out that the show was based on these books I got so excited and binge-read all three of these.
If you don't know, the premise is that on Earth there was the great nuclear blast making it inhabitable to these people have been living on a space station. You can get imprisoned very easily when you're a miner and if you're over 18 you can be "floated" (basically pushed into space without a suit). The government decides to send 100 delinquents to Earth 99 years after the explosion to see if Earth is now habitable. The 100 find they are not alone on Earth.
The show and the books are very different from each other, so much so that you can compare them as two completely different things. Doing my research on the show, I found out that the show was based upon just the premise of the first book in this series and it was not completed at the time the show was developing their story so this can explain the major differences.
Normally, I am a stickler of the rule that the book is always, always, always better than the show/movie. This, however, is not the case with The 100. The books are just not very good. There is no sense of time in these books which is very confusing for the reader. In the first book one of the characters mentions how they have been there "a few weeks" and this occurs during the middle of the book. The second book takes place 21 days (3 weeks) after they landed in the beginning of Book 1. So how could a few weeks have passed by the middle of Book 1 when the whole things takes place in a span of 3 weeks?
The characters are also not very developed. I found them to be very flat and one-dimensional. To be honest, the main reason I bought these books is because Bellarke (Bellamy/Clarke) is canon but the relationship is so underdeveloped. It's not that slow-burn type of relationship that I love, but everything happens all at once. Not only that, but in the books there are two characters named Glass and Luke who are not in the TV show, for good reason, because they are absolutely useless. I found myself getting so annoyed with their characters, especially by the third book. Octavia is also not nearly as much of a BAMF as she is in the show which is quite disappointing. There is also a plot twist in the second book that doesn't add anything to the story and could have been left out completely.
Also, why are only TV tie-in covers available for the last two books? Such a pet peeve of mine that they don't match!
I did a detailed review of the third book Homecoming on my Goodreads here, so if you would like to check that out feel free but be warned it is spoiler-y!
Overall, I'm giving this series 1.5/5 - just go watch the TV show (and then come back here so we can fangirl about Bellarke).
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