2.5 stars

i'm really not sure how i feel about this one yet... and edit: a month later, I still don't.

quick thoughts:

• I hate when I finish books feeling like this: I liked it okay but I didn’t enjoy it that much, I almost put it down but I didn’t want to actually put it down… so Confusion, mostly.
• It ended like I hoped it would but it took me too long to get into that I'm not sure how much I enjoyed it overall.
• The world-building was different and clever and pulled me in, but there was just a few things that didn't work for me.
• I reallllly didn’t like Markos. It started off with him being anti-democracy and trying to kiss Caro without her permission because he heard rivergirls were ‘experienced’ and he assumed he'd be able to seduce her so she would take him where he wanted. I don’t know if that initial situation and his sheer classist arrogance put me off so much he became too irredeemable but I couldn’t stand him.
• This felt like a straight, white Christian American author wrote it and I don’t even know how to express that as a justifiable sentence and how it impacted my enjoyment but you know what I mean?
• ... I still want to read the sequel, though. so really idk what to think about this one.


➸ Trigger warnings for

misogyny, slut-shaming, classism, attempted kiss w/o consent (op & discussed), child abuse recounted, arranged & forced marriages mentioned, alcohol consumption, blood & gore depiction, graphic physical injuries, dead bodies, grief depiction, death of a brother, death of a father & mother (nop), murder, attempted murder, torture (nop), gun & knife violence, stabbing, fire, shipwreck, drowning, kidnapping, captivity, loss of autonomy discussed, and war themes discussed

.

▷ Representation: Caro (mc) is mixed race and brown-skinned.

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