![]() How- I can't even wrap my head around it. Yet, the starling curse is that their people don't live past the age of 25. Are they at half their power, a tenth? How big are they compared to other realms? How many people do they lose a year? We need to understand the stakes! Please!įor example, both of the love interests in this thing are over 500 years old. So how do they have even a year's supply of hearts? It's explained to us that the wildlings are dying, that their realm is losing power, that they don't have enough hearts to sustain them, but it's so hard to have a good grasp on exactly what's going on because there are so many variables that are vaguely explained. The population can't be that high, because it wouldn't be sustainable if people are living longer. But then, the people here live to be very old? Which, presumably means that they don't have very many children. And some of the curses are gnarly! The wildling's curse is that they have to eat a human heart every month to survive. These lands have been suffering with their curses for five hundred years. I have made sense of many things that do not make sense.įirst and foremost, it's impossible to get a real grasp on stakes. More than that, I was a Supernatural fan in my heyday. There are six rulers of six different realms trying to break their curses by competing in a Centennial, a game that takes place on an island that only emerges every hundred years. Which kind of sucks, because her prose isn't good either. The blatant explanations of Isla's struggle in her internal monologue and the faux femininist ideology of this book that would've been standard in the early 2010s really highlighted Sarah J Maas' writing as inspiration. I knew where they were mentally because the author would just tell us. I feel like I had an okay sense of where the characters were spacially. (Also, I don't know how to spell any of these names because I read it on audiobook. I had the privilege of consuming this novel on audiobook, and without the narrator, many writing faults would be more evident. That was a problem deeper than prose, but certainly evident in the writing style. It does not read like fantasy prose and feels entirely too modern. Unique metaphors are one-hit wonders, if you pull them out again, we will notice (hair like ink on his brow, buttery sunlight). Aster's prose is not bad, but undercooked and sometimes repetitive. It's possible to be comforted and find excitement in something that suffers from flaws. But comfort, familiarity, they're not tangible measures of storytelling quality. ![]() I am also that way with certain genres of books or types of movies. Some people like reading 100 different versions of the same kind of book. Yeah.īefore I really lay into this book, I'll say that I understand why people would like it. ![]() More accurately, it's ACOTAR meets the Selection. It's a terrible comparison that sets up false expectations. Also, I can proudly say that any comparison to the Hunger Games is unwarranted. So much of this book is borrowed from ACOTAR that any differentiation from the plot of ACOTAR felt like a subversion of story even if it made perfect sense within Lightlark's narrative. Each scene felt very reminiscent of something out of another YA book. This book is a tiktok success story, an amalgamation of all that tiktok has to offer, and by extension, all the books that are popular on tiktok before it. This book got picked up by a publisher because of tiktok. You can find me over on the storygraph, username bean. I rarely use GoodReads, but because I received an advanced copy of the book, I thought it best to distribute this review across all platforms where I have an account. Focus on actions, on stuff that’s actually happening. This is unproductive and invasive speculation. This situation could been a constructive conversation about the quality of a book, privileges, the highly commercialized state of publishing, the influence of tiktok, or false advertising, and instead we’re having NONE of those. It’s tacky and uncouth and what bigots do every time there are women in a TV show. As someone who dropped one of the first comprehensive bad reviews on this book, I just wanna say I do not support the review bombing of it.
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