sorry I won't support him

ARC version that was not edited or cohesive to the point of near illegibility. Plus the assumed knowledge threshold was a bit too high.

It's okay. I set it down and am finding it extremely impossible to pick back up. 

To start out: I have not read the Master and Commander series that this book was based on (heavily?). So maybe some things are the way they are because of that and I'm on the ignorant side.

Anyway, I did end up DNFing this at 31%. I'm not one for DNFing and normally I'd push through, but The Price of Redemption has the misfortune of coming to me at a time where there are SO MANY good fantasy books coming out right now that I don't really have the patience (stubbornness?) to make myself continue. 

Some contributing factors to my decision:

⚓ Why isn't this a historical fantasy rather than toted as a full blown fantasy? Obviously the map is just the British Isles and Europe with different names. . . same with language/cultures/governments etc. Like, why make things more complicated than necessary? Not only am I stuck trying to follow every single nuance of 18th century English Naval Command, but now I have to figure out what made up name denotes which country on top of it.

⚓ There is a lot of dialogue. A lot. And it's very stilted at the best of times and unintelligible without heavy googling at the worst. Honestly I think of the 30% I read, at least 20% of it was just people talking. And maybe I might've understood all the jargon if I'd read Master and Commander. Maybe. They mostly talked about how ships work or the command chain or maybe obliquely about magic or introducing more and more characters who are very samey.

⚓ Enid feels very male-gazey. She's noble and handsome and people sniff her/notice her scent and admire her neck and the hollows under her collarbones. In fact if she hadn't used that one paragraph of magic in the first chapter, I'd be willing to believe she was just there to be a distraction to all the men! Also she is literally sniffed, the man is publicly rebuked for it, and THEN the captain who punished him spends an inordinate amount of time waxing poetic to himself about the curve of her neck. Just. Ok. I honestly feel like character dynamics and interactions would've been better/more organic if Enid had been a man.

⚓ I just was not having fun. Enid mentions if they'll go out and have some good old naval battles and whatnot to disrupt trade and Rue literally says oh no we have to sail a week with no fun times to get new orders. At the pace (three to four days had passed so far!!) of the story thus far I am too tired to find out how narratively long that week will be.

After reading the introduction, which Dr. McAnonymous tells you not to skip, I wasn't sure if I really believed the author was telling me to not read this book by saying that medical students might find it interesting, but won't help them pass tests, nurses won't find it good because they're too hardcore, and that normies won't like it because it is SAD SOMETIMES. So, ignoring that, I moved onto chapter 1, which started out by making sure I didn't skip the introduction because it was, and I'm paraphrasing a bit 'the best part of the book'. 

If 5 pages dedicated to a ramble about how he changed minor details for privacy reasons (which, PLEASE, almost every single "real story/account" books do from medical to journalism) and another 5 pages literally telling the reader not to read his book, is what you consider "best" then... ok. You win, elusive Dr. McAnonymous. I will take your advice.

I'm DNFing out of spite.

 I promised myself to do more self care in God's Year 2023, so I'm DNFing this even though I started reading it in October of 22. Just thinking about this book put me in a 2 month long reading slump, and I'm just going to chalk it up to not being part of the target audience, despite the fact that I do tend to enjoy YA/New Adult fantasy. I disliked Teo and his immature choices too much to make any of it worthwhile. Good luck to him at not dying tho. 👍 

If someone asked me to read chapter one and then decide if I should buy this book, I'd say: "Absolutely not." It has some of the strangest sentence structuring I've ever seen in my life, and when I first read it I thought maybe I was too tired to understand what was happening, so I slept only to find it was just as confounding in the morning. It's not written in academia, that's for sure, but I feel like if there are a lot of people saying "this was confusing" or "this made me feel stupid", it's probably not good.

Even though the following chapters weren't as stunted as the first, there was almost no exposition to the world, just throws some made up words at us and expects us to pretend to understand what's happening until we can finally make a few connections later on (which is great when it comes to mysteries, but not when you're trying to paint a setting, PLEASE). Also the character Flip is completely incongruous with literally everything else, so much so that it feels shallow rather a comic relief character.

Thank goodness this was an ARC because without some heavy editing this book is impossible to read unless you have a massive amount of patience and some aspirin for the guarantied headaches.