I feel like a significant number of my reviews are opining about how x book is like fanfiction. And if enough books are like fanfiction, am I actually right that this is not a style often found in published literature?
Obviously I think I’m right (lol) and I ALSO think that as writers cut their teeth in fanfic and grow into writers while reading fanfic, the storyshapes more common to fanfic begin to permeate the mainstream.
Fanfic cares about details, fanfic is episodic, fanfic is not a single plot-arc but resolves multiple events over the course of one long story, fanfic assumes you care about the universe, fanfic does not pace the sex but just kind of throws it in regularly.
This is not the storyshape of a romance novel or even epic fantasy, although this book clearly draws on both. If we understand fanfic to be it’s own genre (in the way that novel and novella and interlinked short stories are), then this story makes a lot of sense.
Do I love reading fanfic storyshapes with all new world building? ABSOLUTELY.
I fully appreciate that this book may be hard to market - evidenced by the fact that if I’d known what I was getting myself into, I’d have picked it up much sooner.