By:   Staff Writer Charley Hrobsky

“You are Eadlyn Schreave. You are the next person in line to run this country, and you will be the first girl to do it on your own. No one,” I said, “is as powerful as you.” Eadlyn Schreave, the heir to the throne of Illea, has been forced to hold a Selection of her own in the fourth addition to The Selection series by Kiera Cass. The book takes place twenty years after The One’s ending, and follows Maxon and America’s eldest learn the importance of love and dependency. The castes have been eliminated and all seems like it should be perfect, so why have a Selection for their daughter and not her twin brother? Eadlyn’s Selection is supposed to distract from the riots in the districts of Illea and show happiness throughout the country. Only one teensy problem: Eadlyn does not want it and shows it quite easily to the citizens of Illea.

Let us begin with discussing Eadlyn’s character. Eadlyn is the eldest of America’s twins, by seven minutes. This is made quite clear throughout the entire book during any of Eadlyn’s rants. The rants are not just a few either, they are all over the place. Overall, Eadlyn can be described as bratty, self-centered, and selfish. These three characteristics make no sense when readers compare it to her parents and her very own siblings. Eadlyn’s character could be described as insecure at first. She has to remind herself multiple times that she is the powerful one. However, as the book goes on, readers can see that she does that because she is self-centered. Eadlyn does not seem to care about any of the citizens of the country like her parents do. She hates it when the Selection boys come in and point out all of her flaws that are mentioned above. Or when she goes outside the castle and gets food thrown at her. It is crazy clear that she is detached from the people surrounding her. As the book moves on, Eadlyn’s character has times where she overreacts and says people are attacking her, when they barely touched her, and when she is sincere. When something happens to Ahren, her reaction was a bit creepy. Nothing horrible happened yet she was smashing items and saying how he was an idiot. She can be close to her brother, but she did not want him going anywhere without her. She did not want him to be happy without her either. Perhaps that was due to the fact that she actually was not happy in the life she was leading.  Her character development is a slow one that will hopefully speed up in the next book.

Eadlyn’s brother, Ahren, was by far a great character for pointing out Eadlyn’s flaws. It is clear that Ahren’s love for Eadlyn is one of his greatest priorities. In the spirit of Kiera Cass though, there is a love even greater: his love for the French princess, Camille. Ahren’s love for Camille is the sweetest thing in the world. He writes letters to her even after they talked on the phone for hours because he says there are things you just cannot say on the phone that you can in a letter. That is too true! I definitely wish that Ahren had a bigger role in this book, but perhaps he will show up again in the next book.

The Selection boys in The Heir did not get as much spotlight as readers had hoped. They had their parts obviously, but there were so many boys that they did not get the individuality that the girls did in The Selection, The Elite, and The One. Henri is definitely one of the happiest guys in the entire selection. He was sweet and loving towards Eadlyn, but her attraction to him took longer than it did from his side. Kile has the clichéd childhood sweethearts going for him, but his sarcastic remark and easygoing nature gives him brownie points. Ean gave off a creepy vibe towards the end of the book, but his confidence rings true throughout the entire book. There are many more boys that readers are not introduced to directly in this book, but they shall see where each relationship will lead in the next book.

The last page of the book clearly showed Eadlyn’s small character development throughout The Heir, but she will have to have more to satisfy Selectioners in the future. The Heir, and Eadlyn’s love story, has huge expectations to uphold due to the love toward America and Maxon in the first three books to The Selection series.