Actual rating: 3.5 
 This is a book about superheroes---or rather, antiheroes, that started off wonderfully, but gradually wandered into genericville territory. It was still very good, but I'm still left with a sense of disappointment. The characters in this book didn't live up to my expectations, or to their own potential. It was the equivalent of a movie-based comic book adaptation, and granted, there have been pretty amazing ones...but still, this is a book. A book has so much more potential for plot twists, for character development, and ultimately, this book didn't live up to my high expectations of it. The quality of the writing is excellent, the character portrayals very well done, but the narrative style didn't work for me, and I had a lot of issues with how cookie-cutter some things eventually became. 
 If you had asked me how many stars I would give this book, based on the first 5 or so chapters, I would have said five, no questions about it. The beginning was amazing, the first chapter had hook that pulled me in right from the start. We have people digging up a corpse in the middle of a frigid night. We have a talking, walking girl who just might be dead. 
 This is the present, and we are rapidly brought back to the past...to Lockland University, 10 years ago, where two young men named Victor Vale and Eli Cardale were best friends. Lockland University is the destination of the best and the brightest, and Victor and Eli are the elite among the elites. They share the same intensity for learning, the same sharp brilliance, and a quiet, unspoken rivalry when it comes to life, education, and love. They are like-minded with their fierce ambition, but of the two, Eli seems to be the more sinister, despite his charming, carefree facade. 
 ...something about Eli was decidedly wrong. He was like one of those pictures full of small errors, the kind you could only pick out by searching the image from every angle, and even then, a few always slipped by. On the surface, Eli seemed perfectly normal, but now and then Victor would catch a crack, a sideways glance, a moment when his roommate's face and his words, his look and his meaning, would not line up. Those fleeting slices fascinated Victor. It was like watching two people, one hiding in the other's skin. And their skin was always too dry, on the verge of cracking and showing the color of the thing beneath. 
 For their Comprehensive Science Seminar thesis, Eli unexpectedly chooses the topics of EO: ExtraOrdinary people. People with special abilities, specifically, how science...biology, chemistry, psychology...could explain their existence. 
 An ambitious topic, a creative topic...one that instills a bitter jealousy within Victor. He feels compelled to push Eli further, as they think of ways in which they can trigger these special abilities and become EOs themselves. Victor and Eli become the guinea pigs in their own science experiments, and their hubris goes too far. It works, albeit disastrously. 
 10 years later, Victor has broken out of prison. Accompanying him is "a hacker, a half-dead dog, and a child". And he is out for revenge. He slowly tracks Eli down and draws him out, thanks to the help from his ragtag crew, the aforementioned child and a hulking gentle giant of a hacker. Like all superhero movies, everything leads up to a final, grand confrontation. 
 Victor was out. Victor was free. 
 And Victor was coming for Eli--just as he'd promised he would. 
 He sunk the shovel into the cold earth with a satisfying thud. 
 It took me awhile to realize that this book took place in a pseudo-alternative universe. It's still the current world, as we know it, but it's more like a comic book world, because these EOs are not just theoretical. They're not exactly famous, but it is known that these people exist. It confused me a bit until I realized this fact, because this world seems so similar to our own that it is a little bit of a shock to the system to hear people---specifically, science professors, who are accepting and actually receptive to the idea of a thesis involving people with special powers. 
 What I loved about this book was the writing and the character portrayals. There are no clear cut, no clear message of goodness versus evil here. Both characters can be termed "bad," respectively, even our main narrator, whom we are presumably expected to root for. Victor is not a good man, he has some redeemable qualities, but throughout the novels, his good deeds are tempered with sparks of inhumanity, of violence. He shoots a man, he inflicts pain, he tortures people when it suits his purposes. 
 I had a problem with Eli's character development. He is a good "villain," if you can call him that, but I felt like his development was out of character and inconsistent from what we know of him. It felt like a bit of a cop-out, an easy way to pin the donkey's tail on a character designed to be bad, if you will. Eli's evolution was unbelievable, nonsensical. He turned from a brilliant boy, a normal boy with a crack beneath surface into a madman overnight. 
 "What gives you the right to play judge and jury and executioner?" 
 "God." 
 Eli has always been somewhat religious, it's a contradictory fact about him that Victor finds fascinating, but it is as if he becomes a hypocritical fundamentalist Christian in his rock-solid belief of fulfilling his God-given duty out of nowhere. He did suffer through some traumatic events in the beginning of the novel, but I felt that it was insufficient in explaining his personality changes. It's not enough. It turns Eli from a villain with a potentially complex inner darkness into just another fanatically religious, self-righteous trope. 
 I had a problem with the constant flashbacks in the narrative. It fluctuates a lot. It goes from the present to 10 years past, to last night, to 2 hours ago, to 2 days ago. The chapters are labeled, so that you know where that particular chapter is taken place, during what time, but honestly, it got to be a little too much. The narrative is from a third-person perspective, and we get it from many characters, Victor, Eli, Sydney, Serena, Mitch. It wasn't so bad, because most of the narrative focused around Sydney, Eli, and Victor, but it didn't mesh together well when combined with all the constant flashbacks. 
 Overall, I still would highly recommend this. The writing is spectacular, and the characters are mostly well-done, with the exception of Eli. My complaints with this book are subjective, and I still enjoyed the book despite what I felt to be its faults.