gossamer_lens's Reviews (1.48k)

Definitely was disappointed by this read. Cass's series The Selection, was engaging and quick to read. So I was interested to look into this series. I won't be reading further despite this book ending on a cliff hanger. Where The Selection made a good faith effort at developing the love story, building the friendships up, and providing some world building that presented the characters as having real struggles... This book failed completely. I never felt the main character really felt anything, the love interest(s) were dull and had no cause for affection, and the world building was lacking in many ways.

The Enders’ Shadow series is one of my all-time favs and so far I have enjoyed anything Ender’s Game related that I’ve read. Somewhere I just feel out of this book and have struggled for a year+ with wanting to pick it up but never actually being in the mood for it. I am just accepting that this is currently not something I’m finishing. I think if I ever want to re-read this pre-qual series then I will probably get to finishing this book. But until then… I’m accepting that it’s not something I’m interested in reading right now.

I really enjoyed this read. It contains 4 "short" stories. I put short in quotes as the book itself is rather long, so 3 of the short stories really felt like reasonable-sized books all in of themselves. From what I understand one of these stories is a sort of sequel to another of King's works. I could not tell. It was fun and self-contained so I felt nothing lacking for not having read the first work. 

Two of these stories were a solid 5 star for me. I loved them, felt thoroughly creeped out and intrigued. The other two were a solid 4 star. Each story was thoroughly enjoyable and while I've really only read true short stories by King, these longer "short" stories have confirmed to me that I need to dig into some of his proper novels.

I could write a whole essay on how this book fails. But let's just say the plot was basically non existent, the characters simply... Existed... And the "plot twist" was introduced in the last 5 pages and really made no sense in light of how the rest of the book was written. Kinda felt like maybe the author presented this book to their publisher and the publisher was like... "Eh make it more interesting" and so the author tacked on 5 pages and the publisher went "sure, why not." 

I liked the writing style well enough but everything else failed for me.