DNF @ 42%

This wasn't bad. I just didn't find myself compelled by / invested enough in this story, and at almost the halfway mark that doesn't bode well for a mystery. Maybe I'd have felt differently if I'd read the first two books before this and had formed an attachment to the detective? But who can say.

Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review 

The premise was interesting, but the writing was too juvenile to stomach. The characters - all of them - were cartoons. If you want me to suspend my disbelief enough to go along with a story where a high school science teacher saves the planet from sure destruction, at least have the decency to write like you care about the English language. 

 A couple things:

- This book does not know what time period it's set in. Phones (landlines) and taxis exist, but the grand prize for The Hunt is a whopping $75. Best I can guess it's probably set in the 80s (or the fantasty equivalent) ? But the dialogue veers from EXTREMELY modern to old-fashioned, sometimes within the span of sentences, and I got pissed off trying to paint my own damn picture.

- I could not give two licks about the main characters. I found Wes to be slightly more tolerable in the beginning, but that was changing fast. Maggie has as much personality as a off-brand cereal box. 

- I need us, as a society, to collectively look inwards and reevaluate our definition of "Slow-burn". It took a whole 5 chapters before our MCs were getting their breaths stolen by the sight of one-another. Blegh.

- I'm sorry to say I found the writing clumsy and awkward instead of lyrical and lush, like everyone was insisting it was. And oh GOD the exposition. So much telling. All the time. Constantly. 

TL;DR: I wanted to like this, but it's chock-full of too many things I hate. I'm sure this will work for some people, this just wasn't for me. 

Not feeling this one at the moment. Will probably come back to it at some point.

I thought I wouldn't be able to handle the gore, but that ended up being fine. I just didn't like the writing :( 

 

We had a Show vs Tell discussion at a book club just last week, and if I could time travel, I'd take this book back with me as an example of what not to do for a Tell-Only Narrative. I forced myself to make it to chapter four, and I was bored to tears the entire time.

I try to be kinder with debut authors, but man this really could have used an editor. The sentence structure was unnecessarily clunky and verbose, paragraphs started and ended in strange places, and the mc repeated her thoughts a lot? I had to reread multiple passages before I could parse what was actually written because a lot of this was utter word salad.

 

This is super dry, repetitive, and definitely feels like it's gonna have a Classic Terry Non-ending, too. I'm calling it.

 DNF at 51%

98% of the 51% I read of this book was torture porn. Not a good sign, no?

Save yourself the trouble, friends. 

It was super duper ballsy of the marketing team to compare this book to The Bear and The Nightingale and Spinning Silver. Incredibly brave! Awe-inspiringly gutsy! Do I commend them for their tenacity? Yes? Do I hate them because they fucking led me on? Also, yes.

I kind of understand why they did it. I do. This book is trying so hard to be like both those other books, that it’s kind of embarrassing. It tries to match TBaTN’s sweeping, lyrical prose. It tries to match Spinning Silver’s competent, engaging self-contained storytelling. But it falls short on both accounts – so the writing is purple prose-y in a way that’s not very pleasant (it reminded me of Roshani Chokshi’s writing circa Star-Touched Queen) and the structure of the story was extremely choppy and clumsy.

The first two chapters weren’t too bad, but it becomes very clear very fast that this book really only cared about two things: 1) The romance and b) All the lore that the author wrote up for this story and loved so much that she simply had to shoehorn. all of it. in.

Like, listen. We all write too much lore and backstory for our characters and their worlds. Some of us just have the good sense to know that not everything needs to make it into the finished product. You can’t just have your main characters stop what they’re doing to tell a random-ass story every other paragraph. You can’t. Stop it.

I think I wouldn’t have been so harsh with this book if it had been YA – because I’m doing a thing, you see, where I acknowledge that I’m not the target audience and some things that work for YA audiences might not work for me, an adult woman. This book felt like it was written as a YA book – a babied down watery YA book, sure, but a YA book all the same – but was switched to an adult book at the last minute because the author wanted to shove some seggs in there.

I could go on about how much I disliked this book and how much of a chore it was to read. But much like I couldn’t bring myself to pick it up anymore, I can’t bring myself to talk about it anymore. I just can’t stop being mad about this thing being compared to The Bear and The Nightingale and Spinning Silver. It is, quite frankly, insulting.