3,5 stars

Celestine North lives in a country where any moral or ethical mistakes can ruin your life. A special organisation called The Guild can brand a person in one of five places for different kind of mistakes that can't land a person in actual prison - but means they have limited choices for the rest of their life, are treated like outcasts and have to wear a 'Flawed' F brand on their skin and on their clothes. Celestine believes in the system until one day everything turns upside down and she finds herself being judged Flawed.

I think this was a pretty strong first book in a dystopian series and I enjoyed the writing style as always.Celestine has some great character development throughout the book but I feel like there's still a lot more to come with her and I'm eager to see how she grows in the rest of the series. There was a lot of info dumping at the very start of this book and I felt like some of the information could have been spread out throughout without Celestine telling us everything within the first four pages.

I liked that this was a bit of a dystopian book but apart from the Guild, the world itself was pretty much exactly like ours with school, mobile phones, etc. And because of this, I don't think there was a need for such silly names on some of the characters like Cutter and Alpha. I felt like this was bit too much of a YA dystopian trope that Cecelia played into. I also really couldn't deal with Judge Crevan's name being Bosco and Celestine continuing to call him that for the first part of the book - in Ireland there used to be this red-haired puppet with a squeaky voiced on children's TV called Bosco so that was all I could think of and it was ridiculous. I also really didn't get the whole spiel about how well she knew Bosco and all the talk of seeing him in these moments where he wasn't Judge Crevan and then it turned out Celestine was only dating Art for three months - the way she went on about Crevan and Art I felt like it had been a good nine or ten months, or longer, and to find out it was only three was laughable.

There were times I felt like not that much happened in this book but I also think it was just a really bid build up to the second book. I enjoy the fact that Crevan doesn't have this total control power over everything like say President Snow and things are pretty rocky under his feet and people can play on that. I also like what this whole book and the idea of the Flawed system and the emphasis in being perfect in everything says about our world today.

Flawed is beauty - let's all love our flaws!