booktribe's Reviews (603)

I was so excited for this book. A book about an assassin school with a badass female main character. Sign me up.

However, as soon as I started this book I DNF’ed it for one huge reason and one small reason.

The small reason: those annoying footnotes. Every single time I had to take myself out of the flow of the story to read an unnecessary footnote, I rolled my eyes. They just screamed lazy writing. It’s like the writer read the final draft of the book and said, “Damn. I forgot to explain what’s happening.”, so he just added footnotes at the end instead of writing a good book.

The huge reason: the only Black characters in the book were labeled as “savages”. As soon as I read that I automatically sent it back to my library. THAT is what made this the only 1 star review I’ve ever written. I’m so happy I didn’t waste my money buying this.

DNF at 12%. When you’re 7 chapters into a book and have no idea what’s going on, it’s time to give up.

I waited on this book to come out for a year and I’m so disappointed! It was unnecessarily confusing. There were so many different terms introduced with no explanation of what they meant. I’d have to read a sentence 3-4 times before I either finally understood what it meant, or just gave up and moved on. There is a way to have an intricate magic system without confusing the reader, just ask Children of Blood and Bone. There was no way that I could remember a million character names, a million different magic types, the colors that coincided with each magic type, and a thousand different places. The writing style was way too convoluted.

The story also skipped around too much. I had no idea how a character got from point A to point E because the writer skipped important details, but dwelled on unnecessary ones that made no sense. I couldn’t even picture what was happening in the book because the scene descriptions were terrible. 

I really wanted to love this book! Two rival Jamaican witches out for revenge sounds like the book of dreams, but it wasn’t written well at all. Sadly, I think I have to give it one star…

I was immediately drawn to The Collection Plate because of that beautiful cover! However, while I was reading, the main question I continued to ask myself while reading this was “Do I not understand poetry or is this book just not good at all?” 

     These poems were not easily readable. I usually enjoy poems that are more straightforward, but lyrical. I don’t like poetry where I have to decipher every single line. But maybe that’s just me. I’d recommend it to someone who enjoys poems with a more complicated writing style.

     There were a few poems that I enjoyed though, like “I’m Tired of Yo Ass Always Crying” and “Happy 100th Birthday”. I think this collection just wasn’t my style.