charliauthor's reviews
531 reviews

Im not entirely sure what i just read tbh. 

What started out as a really good premise just sort of blended into this confusing, poorly structured fever dream that im more than happy to be free of. 

This is a “lost heir” trope and i loved the initial premise but it just didnt deliver on any real excitement and the magic system was confusing as hell. It was by far the weakest element of the book. If it had been better explained it might have been more entertaining but overall all, just weak. 

I wasnt entirely sure where this took cultural inspo from. If not for the Middle Eastern word use, these people could’ve looked like and been anyone. When you have a book by a diverse author, you want and need the characters to be unapologetically brown and these seemed to all under the radar so i have no clear understanding of what anyone looks like. 

The MMC was a positive throughout until he sort of wasnt. In the group chat i described him as Edward Cullen by thr end because of his aversion to the FMC’s magic and his unexplained pallid skin. In a Middle Eastern world? Why?! How?!

The FMC was a bit tiresome throughout but i will give it to her for sarcasm and humour. Although the majority of the time it was a little misplaced. 
The side characters had potential but werent fleshed out enough and the romance had a great basis but again, didnt live up to its potential and morphed into insta love. I enjoyed their initial battle of wills but found it unbelievable once a man who’s meant to be so smart, still hadnt worked out who the heir was. 

It just felt really juvenile tbh and i struggle to find something truly outstanding to say about it.

"Through perseverance, all things will end." - Charli

I dont think i've ever been this happy for a book to end. I managed to read up to chapter 80 before I had to put it down for a couple of days because I just couldnt bring myself to pick it up again. It was just so incredible boring!!

In short, the book is terrible. Yes, we're all respectful of other peoples likes and reading choices etc. but this is mine and I HATED this! I hated this with such an intense passion, I dont even know how i'm able to string these words together.

Book 2 was a chore, but this managed to surpass that in every way. From the characters (all 12 million of them), the plot (or lack there of), the dialogue (oh so childish) to the stakes (still trying to find them) this book was bland and uninspired.

It might be dramatic but I feel betrayed and abused by that cashgrab at the end of Book 2. Not only did that not amount to anything substantial or exciting, nothing else did either.
Every exciting theory aka actual plot points that she could have taken, amounted to absolutely ZERO! Perhaps one truly exciting thing happened in regard to the crossover and everything that did happen was unnecessary and boring and didnt really give the links we wanted them to.

I LOVED the Throne of Glass references and when you learned that Lidia was Aelin's descendent or from her bloodline etc. it was PERFECT. I wanted the whole book to be like that!

Why did she spend basically only two seconds in Prythian. I understand that this is not an ACOTAR book so i didnt expect to be there for too long but her time spent there felt stupid because of how long Bryce spent not trusting them. There were so many other ways she could have got the information she needed without the holographic history lesson info dump so it just felt very stupid, especially the whole 'setting the worm as a trap thing'. WTF?
im not going to even give airtime to that diatribe of a history lesson that i couldnt explain to you if there was a gun to my head. 

One of the biggest let downs for this was that Bryce actually regressed as a character and by the end of this, I hated her as much as her father did and with good reason. She's a rude, egotistical, sarcastic, ignorant simpleton who has a mighty high opinion of herself considering she spends half her time talking about how unspecial she wants to be.
Her relationship with Hunt is basic, as is he. Anything remotely interesting about him was destroyed once he became a simp for the neon pink sneaker wearing trashy party girl that she really is. There is not depth to her, no special reason she should be the queen of anything but yet...here we are. The whole he was made for her business after teasing us about his father just fell incredibly flat and added nothing to the story. 

Dont even get me started on the lack of smut from these two! If youre not going to entertain with a decent story then atleast give me some filth akin to ACOSF. This outing was fucking childish and i was so disappointed.

Ithan, Tharion, Jesiba and all the other 956,823 other side characters can eat shit and die.
I have no interest in anything to do with them or their little schemes that ultimately amount to nothing.

Ithan becoming Prime, Hypaxia becoming the head of HoFaS, all the big bad villains being taken out as easy as taking out the trash was just tired and uncreative. The constant deux ex machina vibes throughout just made everything boring because we knew that somehow everyone was going to be saved. Where was the devastation? Where was the terror?

Even while having some semblance of care for Lidia,

why was she given kids?

For what fucking purpose did we need more characters added to this? just to have stakes? FAIL! Just kill the other million cast members for some dramatic effect. Have some consequences!

For me, despite going in with very low expectations because of the previous two books, I did expect SJM to bring something out of the park once the crossover was announced. However, it feels like it was shoehorned in to boost sales where CC series was failing comparatively and then she had to make up a reason for Bryce to be there. The book lacked any real cohesion and the neatly wrapped up HEA element that still has plot lines NOT tied up just felt lazy and disrespectful for a writer of her stature and who we have invested a lot of time and money in.

I'm unlikely read any more CC books if there are any but will likely still invest in ACOTAR books simply because i like those characters better. However, if her style is going to continue on this vein of uninspired, uncreative mediocrity, then i'm no longer involved.

I was really disappointed with this one as i really enjoyed the first 2.
The writing was a bit longwinded in ways that i'd come to expect from the author but this one was let down by the pacing and actually, the lack of smut.
Dex and Nikki were favourites in the previous book so i was super excited to get to their smutty antics but the delayed gratification was a real irritant.
It took too long to get to Nikki's issues and her explaining to Dex who she really was, that I didnt really care by the end.
The smut, when it did come was excellent as ever but it just took too long to get there when i had come to expect this kind of fun from the writer, so felt a little let down.
It is however very funny and very on brand for mafia/darkish romance so i did like the good bits when they were good. In this book unfortunately, there just werent enough of them for me. 

My first DNF of the year unfortunately and im really sad about it. I really tried to push through with this The Mummy inspired tale but it just didnt raise me from the ashes like the Book of the Dead. 

While much better than attempt What the River Knows in a few places, I mostly couldnt get over the constant change in POV mid sentence/paragraph/chapter. It was just really random and kept pulling me put of the story as I had to figure out who was speaking every other sentence. 
It was confusing and longwinded and i couldnt get into what could have been such a fun story, inspired by one of my favourite films!

Things felt a little coincidental in terms of the tomb/excavation but from the elusive dialogue and excessive descriptions, anything of substance just got lost.

I skipped ahead to see if the spice was spicing and it gets a solid 🌶️🌶️🌶️but it also didnt really fit with what was going on around it, the settinf etc. which was odd for me cause smut ahouldnt really fit in Regency romance for example but it can and does. 

Le sigh, not a great one but feel free to check it out. 

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 I like Ana's writing a lot and having read a few of the Kings of Sin series, I wanted to go back and check out her more famous series.
The writing didnt disappoint but I thought the story was a little farfetched and dragged out for it to be taken remotely seriously. While this isnt the point with romance/smut lol this is something I prefer when reading and this just didnt deliver.
I enjoyed the grumpy/sunshine trope a lot but the turn around of the grump just felt too convenient for how grumpy he actually was. It also didnt match with his age. Oh I can ruin your whole family and dynasty at 26 years old because im just THAT ruthless. Okay, sure lol
There also wasnt enough spice for a spice book. Solid 2.5 on the spice-o-meter! 

I have thoughts and none of them are particularly good!

This was meant to be an Egyptian adventure akin to The Mummy about a girl whose parents go missing in Egypt and she travels to find out what happened to them with the help of a magical ring. 

Now, the main reason this book didnt work is because of the FMC, Inez Olivera.
She's immature, rash, naive, stubborn and none of it was redeemable at any point or by the end. She jumps into situations head first without any thought for her safety or others and someone actually dies because of her stupidity! She is enabled by people around her and was just a waste of time every time she made ridiculous choices.

The MMC/love interest Whit, was a complete bore with absolutely no sex appeal whatsoever.
He resembled Rick from Rick and Morty rather than Rick from The Mummy! His whole description was giving drunken hobo rather than unkept rogue and i was just not here for it. His backstory was boring, his personality even more so and the romance was simply non existent. The romance was incredibly forced and at no point was i anticipating them getting together.

There were some suitable red herrings at the start and while there was some interest once the 'real' villain was revealed, it was all a little unsatisfying. The magic system was also a big let down. It was set up that the essence of magic can linger in objects so if you touch it, you can see someone's life/memories. Can everyone do this or just Inez? If they can, whys everyone not walking around going back into the past whenever they feel like it? Everything about it was largely unclear. 

Once we actually got to Egypt the adventure was short lived because everything was discovered so quickly that there was no real excitement about it and everything fell flat.

Overall, this failed because of the main character who was ridiculously annoying as well as having quite juvenile and repetitive writing that i personally didnt mesh with. It had all the potential of an amazing adventure story but simply didnt deliver.

 For the most part i really enjoyed this journey into Norse Fantasy with a Black protagonist because of course it was something id never seen done before. Written by a co author alongside Willow Smith, i was intrigued when seeing this on #Netgalley so immediately made the request.

Going in i knew there would be struggle/slave narrative but due to the historic setting, i had no real issue with this and actually liked how delicately it was handled from the point of our heroine being taken from her village in Africa (modern day Ghana) to a viking town in what i believe is Norway, and how she navigates the change from freedom to captivity.

There is a dual POV with the princess of said viking town and i enjoyed meeting Freydis and understandin the longhouse politics through her eyes as a woman in the traditional role and then in the heroine’s role as a non traditional one.

What made me not love this weirdly enough is that it felt too neat and HEA. Vikings were brutal and while there is a surface layer of what they got up to, it all felt too immature to be a true Viking outing as Ive seen in the tv show Vikings and The Last Kingdom etc which i adore.

So for me, good story, good characters but just a little too tame but I would love for this to get in front of more people so definitely give it a go if you want to try something different.

Thank you to @netgalley @randomhouse @cornerstone and @delrey for the ebook. All opinions are my own. 

Nonsensical

While there were some funny bits overall this premise just didnt make sense and i skimmed most of it. The smut wasnt that spicy considering how often he said he was gonna “ruin her” and the personalities didnt mesh with their “profession”. It was just really confusing and if it had just been a rom com without the unaliving, it wouldve been much better

I read the first book in this series and while I was largely confused throughout the whole thing, I really liked the characters and heist dynamic so i stuck with it. By the time it was finished, I was still none the wiser but thought I would give this book a chance, hoping it would provide some more enlightenment but...it never came.
I honestly cant tell you what the point of this was and its so confusing because there's almost over explanation that allowed the point to get lost. It was an endless regurgitation of facts that's only purpose is seemingly to display how clever the author is. This would have been clear regardless but it just allowed the scenes to drag endlessly by going on tangents about explaining the origin of words. The story just felt lost in the facts and smarts that i couldnt get a handle on anything.

As I said, I really like Severin and Laila as they reminded me so much of Kaz and Inej but after two books of some incredible yearning that resulted in a FTB, I was really disappointed lol I liked the autism rep through Zofia, seeing how she views the world was very interesting as was the eccentric queer member of the team, Hypnos. Enrique however was a bit dull, his feelings of inadequacy a bit repetitive.

What started as a story about secret societies and hidden heirs, just turned into something really random that I couldnt keep up with and just found really disappointing.
I wanted to love these but I wont finish these, its just too draining.