Genre: YA Fantasy Published: Tor Books, january 2017
My rating: 1 star
Quick question: in how many ways have you ever been disappointed in a book…? Because I think this might be a record...
I knew nothing about this book before picking it up, but the synopsis and the promise of this titanforest-world had me sold. Unfortunately, the reading experience was more akin to a swamp than a lush forest: a shallow thing I had to slog my way through, occasionally feeling very dirty whilst doing so. I will get to that "dirty" part later on.
Honestly I feel bad about bashing or even one-starring a book, but I can honestly not think of a single aspect of this book that did not let me down.
The worldbuilding: I feel the author put a lot of time into coming up with this world, however, she did not manage to bring this across. The book is fairly short for an epic fantasy, so perhaps there was simply to little time to develop the worldbuilding properly. Any in depth information about the that was provided, was wrapped up in expositional dialogue or provided in a dry “lecture style”.
The set up was very promising, but it needed a lot more pagetime to be developed enough to be good.
The characters: flat as the leaves that surround them. What little character protagonist Unar does have is unlikeble. She is entitled, immature and is horny all the time. No really; she REALLY likes to think about sex. Which brings me to my next point:
Sex: I can’t remember ever, as an adult, feeling so uncomfortable reading sex scenes. I am not against sex in books, but this was just too cringy. The way the author manages to describe some of the sexual content was honestly repulsive to the point where it was almost funny. (view spoiler)
Writingstyle: apart from some of these very cringy descriptions, the writing was okay at times but trying way to hard at others. Honestly, the cringy descriptions were the part of the writing that I will remember most.
Again, I hate to bash on books, but this was in my opinion one of the worst books I have read this year. I don’t recommend it, not even if you are interested in this world as I was.
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