readabilitea's Reviews (427)

If you're looking for a well-plotted, complex, fantasy with a hot romance at its centre I really must stress that this isn't it. Armentrout got 60% of the way through before thinking that there should actually be some plot.

I found the world really difficult to get my head around and partly it might be because there were no maps in the proof I read but my feeling is that it is because the worldbuilding and overarching plot was second to the romance. So, this is definitely more of a romance that happens to have elements of fantasy, rather than a good balance of romance and fantasy.

The writing was a quite repetitive, although Armentrout at least had the courtesy to find 100 different ways of saying 'I bit my lip' which compared to other writers I've read recently is definitely an improvement. It moves quite quickly, especially ramping up in the last section of the book, and I must say I was hooked by the mystery at the centre of Lis' character.

Some of Lis' characterisation struck me as a bit confused. In the blurb, she's described as a courtesan, but in the book it's clear courtesan carries the implication of sex work, whereas apparently 'paramour' doesn't. Though Lis states that sex work is fine, she also goes to great length to stress that isn't what she does. She's had sex before, and we're led to believe plenty, but when it comes to her and Thorne she's portrayed as nigh-on virginal. These are but two examples where I feel like Armentrout tried a lot to hedge her bets but it would have been better if she'd just come down on one side.

But you know what? For all my criticisms, this was an incredibly easy and addictive read that I enjoyed enough to finish, albeit with a lot of eyerolling.

I can imagine returning to this one in the future but for now the pacing is just too sluggish for my interest to be held. I love the sound of the world and the West African myth woven into the story, but so much time is being spent on internal monologues that aren't really adding new dimensions to the characters and I feel that these come at the expense of propelling the plot forward.

My tolerance for basic writing and plot predictability is pretty high, but I found it difficult to get through this one and in the end resulted to skimming just the speech.

The primary problem for me was how unnecessarily repetitive the writing was. I felt like I was being treated as stupid and as if my hand needed holding all the time, as though without the constant recapping, the stating the obvious, and the incessant reminders of "Don't let her die. We are coming." I would have forgot everything I had read up until that point.

I also felt this handholding and the telling rather showing aspect of the writing was a problem when it came to some of the sensitive issues handled in the book.

when Kiva reveals her self-harm to Jaren, and when he reveals his mother's addiction to Kiva, what followed was a lecture encompassing the beginning, middle, and end of a trauma storyline and it left me feeling really icky, as if the author wasn't actually engaging with the topic but using the trauma to add some history to her characters, justified by ending on a spelling out of what to do should you ever encounter these issues in real life.

This book is full of YA fantasy tropes and I see why people like it, after all that's exactly why I picked it up: I wanted an easy, action-packed read that would be difficult to put down. Ultimately though this backfired because I was left with so many questions that regularly took me out of the reading experience. If the prison is regularly overpopulated, why would you just accept kids coming in with the parents? The guards clearly don't mind being cruel so why would you not just forcefully separate children and their arrested parents before getting to the prison? Why are the trials impossible without magic and not just very very difficult?

How did Kiva just forget that a stomach bug was what caused her father's death?

If we are supposed to believe throughout Kiva is rigid about sticking to her healer code, why does she at one point worsen a guard's symptoms rather than just giving him a less effective remedy?

A slightly more minor point of annoyance was that the pacing was off. It starts off promisingly but slumps majorly in the middle section, which is even more baffling considering the whole appeal of a Trial format is the suspense and danger that propels a story forward. Instead of this, we spend pages upon pages conducting pointless scientific experiments?? And then it picks up at again towards the ending, finishing on a lot of drama and 'revelations' which felt contrived and fell flat.

Overall, I was pretty disappointed in this book and even the desire for plot resolution isn't enough to make me want to read the rest of the series.