DNF at 30%. I always feel a little like I personally failed when I DNF a book, but this one is just wall-to-wall relentless angst inflicted on undeveloped, irritating characters via shoddy writing. 

I always feel guilty trashing indie authors who manage to get their work out there in front of an audience without the benefit of the traditional industry, but this one needed a team of professional editors. The language is overly flowery and wordy and tries too hard to sound like a high fantasy novel, to the extent that everything sounds overwrought all the time. (Example: “The blood drained from my entire body” as Max experiences a moment of minor tension.) There are multiple instances of the wrong word being used, referring an ancient hero’s valiance as “valance”, or saying that a woman swathed in a formal dress is “swaddled” in it. I also saw a lot of poorly structured clauses/paragraphs, such as sentences where an introductory clause’s subject is not the same subject as the rest of the sentence, which is an issue that I’ve seen in almost every self-published novel I’ve read. (Example: “Recoiling with a hiss, the shallow cut stung, coated in spilled oil.” I assume it’s Max who recoils, but this reads as though the cut itself recoils and hisses.) And there are frequent passages that are ambiguous or just confusing, made worse by the unnecessarily embroidered wording. (Example: “A single tear of sweat” [what? Is it tears or sweat?] “ran down my temple, leaving a nasty shiver in its wake. I dared reach up and clear it because every one of my movements were being scrutinized by King Gathrax.” Either there’s a word missing in that last sentence, or a different word than “because” should have been used. Also “every one of” makes the movements singular, so it should be “was being scrutinized”.)

I can forgive a lot of writing sins for an engaging story and interesting characters, but this book unfortunately lacked those things and I had to give up. There’s nothing to recommend here.

Did not finish, gave up on page 30 of 418, mildly heartbroken. I wanted so, so badly to love this book. It’s got a transmasc protagonist! Said protagonist sounds like a lovable himbo! The author is a queer person with autism! These are all things I love and/or want to support with my purchasing dollars, and I also bought this book knowing that I enjoyed the author’s other work, writing for the James Somerton YouTube channel.
Adding a note here on 12/3/2023 to say that the James Somerton channel has now been pretty conclusively shown to have plagiarized a lot of its writing from other content creators, which sadly explains a great deal about the quality of this book.

I was devastated to find that this novel reads like it hasn’t been edited or proofread. I’m talking about three or more instances on each page of typos, inaccurate punctuation or capitalization, incorrectly structured clauses and sentences, wrong words or verb tense being used, and/or not-technically-wrong-but-confusing tense usage. With several very heavy, brutally honest rounds of editing, I think there is a story and a main character here that I could love, but as it stands right now, getting through each page is a struggle as I mentally translate from Bad English to English.