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reubenalbatross
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25% into this book and the only complaint I had was that one of the characters is called Elizabeth Bennet and nobody once made reference to Pride and Prejudice. How I wish that was the biggest problem I came across.
Because Holy. Fucking. Shit. What the FUCK with the predatory age gap ‘romance’????????
1. Joe ‘chose’ Ox when Joe was TEN and Ox was SIXTEEN. What the fuck.
2. They then spend basically all their time together, with Ox an extension of the family. So they were brothers, brothers!! I was thinking it would even be weird if Ox shacked up with Carter, but JOE????
3. With the knowledge that they were ‘mated’, all of Joe’s possessiveness wasn’t just an insecure kid wanting attention, he was JEALOUS that a kid SIX YEARS OLDER than him was fooling around with other people. I was really hoping that Joe’s possessiveness would be presented as an insecure/overly attached child learning to let people live their own lives. But nope. This is just gross.
4. Ox gets the crazy hots for Joe (who has strictly been his ‘little brother’ until this point) when Joe is SEVENTEEN and Ox is TWENTY-THREE. Gross gross gross.
5. And then every single family member justified Ox and Joe’s feelings, and said it isn’t a problem at all. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.
The only way their relationship might have been acceptable would be if they didn’t see each other for (at minimum) ten years, and reunited when Joe was 27ish and Ox 33ish. Then I think it could be ok. But straight out of high school?? Despicable.
How did such a delightfully cute book turn so deranged so quickly??? I’m glad this isn’t the first of Klune’s books I’ve read, as I would definitely have sworn him off for good. I’m still considering it even now.
I feel I should have known better than to expect good things from this. I’ve been reading all the 2023 Goodreads Choice Award winners this year, and all have been terrible.
The first warning sign was that Kate’s POV is set in 2019, when video/smart doorbells were already pretty common. Yet, in all Kate's incredibly important planning, the idea of her husband installing a smart doorbell doesn’t even cross her mind?? If he isn’t tracking you with your phone, obviously he’ll be monitoring the door to visibly see you leaving??? She’s also of the opinion that it’s completely wild for a doorman to keep tabs on her if asked, when it really isn’t.
The next warning sign was Violet’s POV being set during WW2, need I say more?
The final kicker was the incredibly BASIC writing style, and absolute absence of originality or nuance in the themes and discussions broached so far. From reviews this doesn’t get any better, and it goes on to include a shit tonne of gratuitous violence towards women. No thanks.
Thus I come to the end of my 2023 Goodreads winners reads. I will not be doing this challenge again.
The first warning sign was that Kate’s POV is set in 2019, when video/smart doorbells were already pretty common. Yet, in all Kate's incredibly important planning, the idea of her husband installing a smart doorbell doesn’t even cross her mind?? If he isn’t tracking you with your phone, obviously he’ll be monitoring the door to visibly see you leaving??? She’s also of the opinion that it’s completely wild for a doorman to keep tabs on her if asked, when it really isn’t.
The next warning sign was Violet’s POV being set during WW2, need I say more?
The final kicker was the incredibly BASIC writing style, and absolute absence of originality or nuance in the themes and discussions broached so far. From reviews this doesn’t get any better, and it goes on to include a shit tonne of gratuitous violence towards women. No thanks.
Thus I come to the end of my 2023 Goodreads winners reads. I will not be doing this challenge again.
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The most interesting part of this book is that it made me realise that the four horsemen are angelic beings sent by God, not things from hell sent by the Devil... have thought they were 'baddies' my whole life, I’m now realising that ‘God’ is actually just a petty man who actually hates everyone, lol.
The book started off relatively interesting, but went downhill pretty quickly, and it started to piss me off way more than I was enjoying it. One of the biggest culprits of this is that so much of the world building and timeline makes absolutely zero sense. At one point it seemed to me like they had been together at least for a couple of weeks, but Sara said it had barely been a week…
Also, at around 20% I noticed more and more things in the writing that made no fucking sense - did the editor just give up?
For example:
“I peel away the sandwich's packaging, and sure enough, between the two coarse loaves of homemade bread is...jam. And only jam.”????
1. Slices of bread aren’t called fucking loaves.
2. Sara’s never even heard of a jam sandwich?? Do PB&Js not exist in this world??
2. Sara’s never even heard of a jam sandwich?? Do PB&Js not exist in this world??
Then literally a page later she turns a light switch on, the light works for a second, then blows. IT’S PROBABLY JUST THE FUSE THEN? But instead of trying to find the fuse box to fix it, she just gives up?
This book is not good enough for me to be able to tolerate this level of bullshite. Farewell.
Issue number 1 – It’s absolutely wild that Victoria is in love with Wil in .5 seconds flat?? Yeah, she's 17, but come on! Don’t think I’ve ever seen instalove as bad.
Issue number 2 - 20 pages in and its already feeling like 'savage and mythical/magical' Native American fetishisation and stereotyping. And from reading own voice reviews on Goodreads, it looks like my instincts were correct, and it in fact gets even worse as the book progresses.
No. Thank. You.
Issue number 2 - 20 pages in and its already feeling like 'savage and mythical/magical' Native American fetishisation and stereotyping. And from reading own voice reviews on Goodreads, it looks like my instincts were correct, and it in fact gets even worse as the book progresses.
No. Thank. You.
This book feels like it’s trivialising the serious subjects it contains. There’s definitely a place for humour in murder mystery/thriller books (Thursday Murder Club is a great example), but not when the 'humour' reads as if it’s making light of terrible circumstances.
I also didn’t find it funny, and there were WAAY too many ‘sticky kid’ descriptions. I already know I don’t want kids, no need to labour the point.
I also didn’t find it funny, and there were WAAY too many ‘sticky kid’ descriptions. I already know I don’t want kids, no need to labour the point.
This just isn’t sparking joy for me. I’ve been dreading going back to it, rather than being excited to continue. I just realised I don’t really care about the story…
I’ll keep my copy, and maybe go back to it at some point.
Ooof, this book has issues. One of the most egregious being a privileged American with Indian heritage writing about some of the poorest and most problematic elements of rural Indian culture. When I first started noticing the lack of authenticity in Shroff’s voice, I did some research on her background. From the information I’ve been able to find, Shroff does have relatives in India and visits somewhat regularly, but her family seem pretty well off and live in a big city – meaning she has no lived, or really even any close to lived, experience of the rural villages she is writing about.
It's also very telling that the 2 reviews in the top 20 on Goodreads that are from obviously own-voice readers are critical of this. From Srivalli Rekha’s review on Goodreads:
“I cannot ignore the attempts at presenting a poor, pathetic, ugly, dirty India with Indians who can’t think beyond caste and religion. This has been an image the developed countries love and expect from third-world countries. I’m tired of authors catering to such needs and playing an earnest brown sepoy.
I won’t deny the existence of ugly in my country. But we have so much good too. We have people working for equality, balance, and overall growth of the country. Presenting a more balanced view wouldn’t make one any less of an activist.”
And the fact that Shroff was using this setting to talk about so many aspects of women’s rights/oppression just made this inauthenticity feel even more shallow. As an English person, if an American who had grown up wealthy in America, but had English parents, wrote a book about one of the poorest parts of England and essentially turned it into poverty porn, I’d be mightily pissed off. The same applies here.
Aside from this, there were plenty of other issues, including:
The opening chapter was INSANELY fatphobic for no reason. In the scene, the only one of the four women who is described physically in detail is the fat one, and it’s almost talked about like it's a moral failing. She “blotted her upper lip with the back of her wrist. Fresh sweat bloomed quickly.”?? There are multiple references to how she used to be 'slender', and the writing definitely equates this with her being a nicer person in the past.
Every time she’s mentioned in the first 6 pages her weight is brought up, again, FOR NO REASON. In comparison, we barely get any physical description of the main character, let alone the other two women. She’s also the most villainised of the four, which really just adds salt to the wound. And 33% into the book there hasn’t been a lick of commentary about these thoughts being problematic, so clearly Shroff just thinks she used totally acceptable descriptions. Gross.
I never figured out when the book was set. The first three chapters had information that implied it was set in the 80s, but then in chapter 4 it’s mentioned Geeta used a mobile phone almost 20 years in the past? So it must be modern day? But 138 pages in I’m still not 100% certain when it’s set. No modern technology has been mentioned apart from that one liner about mobiles. I've googled pretty much every 'real life' thing mentioned (from rupee exchange rates, to laws, to celebrities), and it’s definitely not any earlier than the 90s. But it shouldn't be this difficult to work out! I shouldn't have to do a deep dive to figure out when a book is set.
I was also very confused by the loan situation. For such a pillar of the book, Shroff really didn’t explain it enough. We’re literally told Saloni is rich, and Geeta has a pretty sizeable amount of savings (10x the weekly loan amount), so why do either of them need the loan?? If they only need this relatively small amount of money for their businesses, why can’t they just use their own money? Especially Geeta, with no-one to hold her back.
And finally, the characters are really nasty people who dart between emotions at the drop of a hat for no reason. It made conversations extremely hard to follow, and I never got invested as they’re all so vile.
Not for me, thanks.
Not for me, thanks.
11% in and I can’t continue with this, it’s enraging me. Most of it was as a British person being annoyed by an American’s poor attempt at writing Welsh characters. The writing is also SO bloated, it definitely needed more editing.
This is the list of things that annoyed me most in the 29 pages I read:
Rhys (Welsh character) talking about it raining –-
"that it started pissing down"
This is NOT how we use ‘pissing’ – it is always ‘pissing it down’, the rain doesn’t start ‘pissing down’.
Pubs in the UK don’t have open bowls of snacks these days, and never in my 27 years of life living in the UK have I seen one, especially in a country pub.
In one sentence describing Rhys' father's study –-
"There was black wood, more velvet..."
The very next paragraph –-
"Not one velvet item... in the whole place."
Which one is it??
Rhys’ father chiding Rhys for how long he’s been away –
"Half a year," his father replied because why say a normal thing like "six months"?"
There's truly no fucking difference??? What is there for Rhys to be annoyed about in that? Half a year is just as normal as six months, maybe even more so!
"A hundred years ago, his ancestor"
Really, calling someone who’s probably only your great-grandparent an 'ancestor'? That’s not normal.
"Rhys lifted his hand to give his brother a double-fingered salute"
1. A British person would never call it that, especially using 'salute'
2. This is a middle finger moment, none of that bullshit two finger nonsense.
It's definitely not worth me pushing through this for what, as far as I can see, is an extremely mediocre book. Farewell.
I really thought this book would be good. Yes, it’s popular with the ‘masses’, which is usually a sure sign I’ll hate a book, but I’ve also seen many people who align with my tastes give it 5 stars, so I had pretty high hopes. Oh boy, was I disappointed.
This book is not what it’s sold as, not what I think Islington thought he was writing. It isn’t any sort of complex, grand fantasy like Tad Williams or John Gwynne. It’s a (pretty poorly written) YA 2010s dystopian story with underdeveloped fantasy elements thrown into the mix. It’s just recycled tropes repackaged in flimsy Roman inspired packaging.
The beginning was one of the clunkiest openings I’ve ever read. Loads of worldbuilding was shoved pretty unceremoniously into the first two chapters, but I still didn't understand what was going on. However, the structure of the world did seem pretty complex, so I was willing to give all of this some grace if it improved as the book went on. It didn’t. The magic was never properly explained, even though it was an essential part of the plot, and the info dumps only got slightly less obtrusive.
The info dumps were certainly not helped by the book being written in first person. Sharing information in first person can be done, but takes a lot more skill than Islington apparently has. The story would be trucking along nicely, then for literally no other reason than to tell the reader something, Vis goes on a detailed inner monologue ramble about the basic concepts of a world he would NEVER have to actually think about. When he was around other people, talking to them, and actually learning new things the problem decreased, but it was pretty horrendous at the beginning.
The main character being called Vis really fucked me off. Three letter names that are clearly rip-offs of Vin from Mistborn are so prevalent in modern fantasy writing, and for what reason??? Is it really so hard to have an ounce of originality??? The nail in the coffin, as is often the case, being that Mistborn is literally mentioned on the dustjacket as one of Islington’s inspirations… There’s inspiration, then there’s blatant copying.
Coming on to the writing style – it’s pretty goddamn bad. Some of it is insanely repetitive for no reason. For example, the following are the last sentences from three consecutive chapters:
“one morning I'm dressing for my journey to the naumachia”
“We've arrived at the naumachia”
“Below, the naumachia begins.”
Would it kill to have just a teeny bit of variation??
It was also just incredibly clunky. Sometimes I can find adjusting to a new writing style takes a bit of time, but 360 pages in I still felt it, so it clearly wasn’t a me problem. For example:
"Dawn is bright and clear the morning of the day I leave for the Academy."
It’s sentences like this that are a lot of the problem. So many extra words that are completely unnecessary and ruin the flow.
Then coming to the plot, in which everything was WAY too easy for Vis. He just breezes through everything, and every idea he has works out well for him, which should definitely not be the case in a world that is totally against him on all sides. Even when something does go wrong, it still ends up working to his advantage, and by the half-way point of the book I knew everything was going to turn out fine, so the stakes were non-existent. The one quote from Vis that tipped me over the edge was:
"I've been unimaginably lucky"
Yeah, LIKE YOU ARE ALL THE TIME, yet he says it completely sincerely, and like nothing ever goes right for him. This all compounded into a lot of depth being missing from the book, as I never felt any tension, even during events Islington was trying to make the reader believe were life or death.
The plot as a whole was also pretty unbelievable. It was absolutely wild that we were meant to believe that all of this secret ruin stuff had never been leaked. Big fuck off massive buildings on a relatively empty island, full of some of the brightest kids in the country, and no-one apart from Ulciscor has thought to investigate them?? And the only person to successfully get past these crazily heighted security measures was our special, perfect, not like the other boys 17-year-old with two months of training?? Insane.
As soon as I got to the part about the injured puppy, my eyes audibly rolled into the back of my brain. Without a SHADOW of a doubt, I know it’s going to end up being Vis’ bestest friend in the whole wide world. SUCH an overdone trope at this point. This, combined with the reveal of the labyrinth being training for whatever is in that cavern, was the last straw for me. I’ve got too many good books to read to waste any more time on this poorly written rehashing of every fantasy book ever written.
I’d say I’m baffled by the wall of 5-star reviews this book has received, but unfortunately, in reality I’m not all that surprised. From reviews, as is quite common for popular books, this was a lot of peoples 'first proper fantasy', which explains the worryingly rave reviews. It’s like baby's first fantasy. Even so, reading these 5-star reviews is actually quite concerning - one of the best books you’ve ever read??? Most of them are about the 'amazing ending', and I know from past experience that shock endings can really affect how someone initially rates a book.
I’d say I’m baffled by the wall of 5-star reviews this book has received, but unfortunately, in reality I’m not all that surprised. From reviews, as is quite common for popular books, this was a lot of peoples 'first proper fantasy', which explains the worryingly rave reviews. It’s like baby's first fantasy. Even so, reading these 5-star reviews is actually quite concerning - one of the best books you’ve ever read??? Most of them are about the 'amazing ending', and I know from past experience that shock endings can really affect how someone initially rates a book.
Talking of the ending, I did spoil myself, and my god am I happy I DNF’d. If nothing else makes it obvious that this book belongs in the depths of the 2010s, that sure did.
Overall, this book has a truly great premise, and one that I was really hoping to love, but a completely lacklustre everything else. I didn’t completely hate what I did read of it. Some of the plot points were really interesting, the twists shocking at times, and if the magic system had actually been fleshed out properly, I think I’d really like it. Unfortunately, it really needed more time to cook, and honestly probably another round of editing. I can excuse one or more of the criticisms I’ve highlighted above if the rest of the book is strong, but this one gave me absolutely nothing.
I was recommended this book as I was looking for diverse fantasy stories. Unfortunately, it isn't written well at all.
The writing is so basic, with clunky worldbuilding, bizarre tense useage, and is overall uninspired. Does not read naturally at all.
I also didn't like that only 10 pages in it had already been really prejudice against the poor people in the city, for seemingly no reason. The first PoV character is advised to not go to the poor areas as he'll be robbed, and that all 'lowly' taverns are horrible, violent places. Not great.
Also, bearing in mind the author is white, I did find it a little uncomfortable that the black elves had actual black skin (described as 'obsidian'), rather than human 'black' skin i.e. brown.
All in all, not something I want to waste my time on. So glad I didn't pay full price for my copy (£17!).
The writing is so basic, with clunky worldbuilding, bizarre tense useage, and is overall uninspired. Does not read naturally at all.
I also didn't like that only 10 pages in it had already been really prejudice against the poor people in the city, for seemingly no reason. The first PoV character is advised to not go to the poor areas as he'll be robbed, and that all 'lowly' taverns are horrible, violent places. Not great.
Also, bearing in mind the author is white, I did find it a little uncomfortable that the black elves had actual black skin (described as 'obsidian'), rather than human 'black' skin i.e. brown.
All in all, not something I want to waste my time on. So glad I didn't pay full price for my copy (£17!).