I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum. This book is much-beloved! If you love this book, you are in excellent company. 

I thought I would love it too… turns out I didn’t. I didn't connect with it, put it down. Any other book, I'd have quietly DNFed and never thought about it again. But it blew up on booksta, I second guessed myself, finished it, and here I am.

What I liked:
▪️ The dragons were fine.
▪️ The sexual tension, kinda. If I squinted.

What I didn’t like:
▪️ The narration. First person present tense should feel immediate, but this felt distant and story breaking. Apparently present tense time lapse montages are a thing. And info-dumping directly to reader in this tense.. was I the Ghost of Christmas Present?
▪️ The entire romance plot. First a love triangle I wanted to yeet into the sun. Then “enemies to lovers” aka instalust between characters who don’t hate each other, do nothing bad to each other, and help each other all time, aka NOT ENEMIES TO LOVERS. Then bam, the MCs getting together still managed to feel sudden.
▪️ The setting. AITA for thinking a fantasy kingdom called Navarre should be about irl Navarre? Yet this wasn’t a Basque culture-inspired fantasy? The world was that non-descript liminal fantasy setting I despise. Disappointing.. and insensitive?
▪️The heavy-handed foreshadowing. It hinted so hard at everything that the reveals came pre-spoiled. And the ending was too predictable!
▪️ The characters. We barely scratched the surface of their one-dimensionality.
▪️ The dialogue. It was awkward and mostly exposition for the reader.
▪️ The character deaths. Not only did I feel nothing, the book couldn’t decide if the deaths were a Big Deal or just another Tuesday at death school. Plus, it made no sense: elite fighters or cannon fodder, gotta pick one. And I needed more background ideology to justify peeps risking their lives to this extent.
▪️ The plot. Beyond the repetitive and boringly deadly micro-plots (Parapet, Gauntlet, Presentation, Threshing, Squad Battle, War Games..), there wasn’t enough of a macro-plot to sustain the story. Also, the plot holes.
▪️ The names. Character names are my favourite fantasy culture vectors. So this name salad was killing me.
▪️ And is it just me, or did the queer side characters feel tokenized?

I thought this would be a perfect book for me—I love adult fantasy romance. But the fantasy elements weren’t as complicated as I’d expect from adult fantasy, and the romance plot didn’t hit like my favourite adult romances can. It was fantasy-light and romance-light, when I wanted fantasy and romance-max.

Again, most people love this book. And if you’re one of them, we can still be friends right??