Great cover, interesting premise, not great execution.

This book tried to do both horror and fantasy and did neither well. Instead of exploring the world and lore further, we got jump scares and monster scenes. Instead of building relations to the characters so that character death actually meant something, we got endless cave scenes and bickering.

Honestly this book started off alright, and the exposition was honestly quite interesting. Larkin was starting to grow on me and I felt for her situation and family, and it overall gave me some hunger games vibes. It was cut off too short though, and all that build-up washed away for me. We were suddenly thrown with a bunch of new cast members, and they started dying off so quickly you knew not to get attached (and so I didn't).

This book also was such a drag to read? I was listening to it on audio and that still tired me out. I had to force myself to keep listening at points, and it just got worse as the book went on. The twists didn't catch my attention at all (they felt weak and uninteresting, we didn't have enough connection to the world/lore for them to actually mean something). Deaths at some point stopped meaning anything, they just happened and that meant there were less characters involved. Even the

Spoiler

the whole heritage thing didn't do it for me, especially when it was revealed that Larkin was the descendent of Kyran because of course she is.

I was originally interested in the whole Empaths + manipulating emotions into magic thing, but we only really got the development from the beginning of the story regarding it. This book tried to explore the depths of that magic without actually doing so, we still only ever got glimpses of the amount of power they could wield from myths and stories, and the occasional

Spoiler

disciple doing something

. It also very quickly warped into magic aimed at warping bodies. I guess that's the horror element coming in but it felt like a narrowing of what we knew the magic could do, and the author decided to just only focus on the most potentially gruesome aspect.

Overall, not for me. There's a lot of things that could've been done better, especially because the setup and body manipulation gave me similar vibes to Gideon the Ninth, which I loved. It really wouldn't have been hard for this to be my thing, but it just lacked in all areas for me.