“I would not just disappear into a void as though I'd never existed. I would not accept that I was less than these people just because they'd designed me that way.”

Stars (Out of 10): 2.5/10 Stars

Overall Thoughts: I have friends that both loved and hated this book, so I had no idea what to expect going in. For the most part, I loved the plot and the story, and was enjoying reading it (read it all in one sitting, it had me hooked!). And then I hit roughly 60% of the way in, and this book decided to do everything I disliked basically. The star review dropped quickly after that. Also, I desperately wanted this to be a stand-alone, but suddenly it’s a trilogy and I hate that I now feel obligated to continue reading.

The Good: I really enjoyed the plot for most of the book. I enjoyed the political intrigue and planning going on. I also felt that the author did a decent job of making the main character, Nemesis, act like a different creature and think different in general from a ‘normal human,’ even if it made it really hard to relate at first, and get into the book.

The Bad: I’m gonna try and be as vague as possible without spoilers. First off, I never found myself able to connect with characters, and when I was about to with Nemesis, the situation suddenly changed and I wasn’t a fan of her anymore. The side characters, often a saving grace in a book, were constantly either dead or lying, or suddenly ditched by Nemesis, so you never could really get attached to those guys either.

Now here’s my problem with the plot, and why I started disliking the book after 60% in the vaguest terms possible. For the first 50-60% of the book, we follow more of a physical plot, based on actions and effects rather than emotions and change there. By the time the author decided to make the romance more tension filled, I was way too into this physical plot mindset to be able to fully go along with the emotional plot shift we had for the next hundred pages or so. This made the sudden focus on emotions and relationships really jarring, and unnatural feeling. Even worse, we take a sudden spin back to this physical plot for the last 5-10%, and by that point, you got sucked into worrying about emotions, and less about actual events, so you get all disoriented by the sudden change again. And on top of that, the ending was such a mess of truth and lies that that’s hard to discern when you’re just coming out of a whirlpool of emotions a chapter ago. I’ll be more specific about this down in spoilers, but this was probably one of the main things that irks me still after reading.

SPOILERS BEGIN HERE

The Characters: I wasn’t a fan. Any character I started to like suddenly had a reason for me to dislike them after. Nemesis, I was finally getting attached to when she started accepting her emotions and reaching out, but then suddenly she drew back sharply and viciously, returning to the monster she believed she was and pushing everyone away. (This is such a pet peeve of mine in books because it’s no fun to read at all.) I really liked Neveni, but then she got sent away after Nemesis had little to no use for her anymore. Tyrus was cool, and interesting, from his backstory to his demeanour, but I was not a fan of some of his possessiveness and ideals later, of the whole needing Nemesis to choose and everything. And then we have Sidonia, who not only died once for Nemesis to realize she had feelings, but twice. And then that random sub-romance thrown in where suddenly she liked Nemesis I guess. Which was odd to me because I saw them having a sisterly sort of bond and all that.

The Plot: A lot of my ranting about this already took place in the non spoiler section, so I’ll try to keep myself from too much parroting. But here’s a rundown of all the plot points that made me rate the book as low as I did, when I initially enjoyed it.

Nemesis jumped out of character when she confessed her love for Tyrus, and then again when forgiving him without surety of his innocence in Sidonia’s death, which seems such an anti-Nemesis thing to do. She spent this whole book talking and sounding this one sort of way, but in that scene, she felt so off that I thought I was reading a different character’s interactions with Tyrus.

The amount of jealously that suddenly appears in the last half of the book was overbearing, and it seemed to be all that was on Nemesis’s mind for a good 50ish pages until Nemesis and Tyrus finally had their yelling match that resulted in them both realizing they’re idiots who are obsessed with each other.

The jump of focus from an action based, physical plot, to a romantic one once Nemesis cut herself off, back to a physical one around the time Sidonia died and everyone figured out they were all keeping things from each other.

The annoying fact that Nemesis was never strong to deal with grief on her own, and could only come out of those bad moments when she was thinking about Tyrus and love.

The ending was too all over the place for me, and I still have no idea who was lying about what. Which angers me, because this means I have to continue the series in order to actually found out fully what happened in this book.

I really did love the beginning and set up of this book, but it just fell apart too quickly for me, and I ended up being left quite disappointed and unsatisfied.

The World Building: This was pretty well done I thought, even if some content just came dropped off in chunks. I never had it where I didn’t know what was going on because the world wasn’t explained enough, but I also never felt oversaturated with useless information. In addition, the whole sci-fi but with an emperor thing was a pretty cool world to read about, even if I didn’t enjoy everything about the plot and characters

The Favorite Character: Neveni, she deserved better

This review, and others, can also be found on my blog: https://paragraphsandpages.wordpress.com/