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lakinglaze's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Wow! This book was just amazing! I fell in love with everything about this story and these characters. I think Raeve might be my favourite FMC ever now. And Kaan…well Kaan is just the most 🖤🖤🖤 man ever! I can’t wait to see where this will all go with the next installment!
Content Warnings
Moderate: Blood, Body horror, Classism, Cursing, Injury/Injury detail, Murder, Sexual content, Violence, Vomit, Alcohol, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Cannibalism, Confinement, Death, Death of parent, Fire/Fire injury, Grief, Sexism, Torture, Gore, and Medical trauma
crybabybea's review
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
1.0
This book is a great light entertainment romantasy in the same vein as ACOTAR or Fourth Wing. I, however, feel duped because it was being sold as a high fantasy with romance and incredible world-building. If you love love love fleshed out fantasy, political strife, and detailed magic systems, you probably will not like this book. It falls apart once you look at it too closely. Fun for what it is but I have to rate it low because it's not what I look for in a fantasy. If I were rating this just solely as a romantasy I still wouldn't rate it very high. I felt ACOTAR was even written better than this which is a very low bar.
I wrote a 3,000 word essay for how much this disappointed me, so here are the bullet points:
I wrote a 3,000 word essay for how much this disappointed me, so here are the bullet points:
- Shallow world-building. There are cool, unique things that happen but they serve no purpose for the world (such as the dragons turning into moons).
- World building is lazy and the author relies on you reading a 20 page glossary to understand rather than fleshing out the world herself
- Dragons are part of the world but don't serve any purpose beyond transportation.
- No political strife, except for the FMC telling you how awful the king in her region is, despite having a crazy cool premise with a dragon mythology-based elemental magic system whose users are denoted by their colorful beaded earrings.
- Nothing happens in the plot except the very slow burn romance which doesn't pay off at the end
- Magic doesn't really serve any purpose except to sound cool
- The conlang is messy and doesn't work well
- The writing itself is clunky, full of heavyhanded metaphors that don't land
- Writing repeats itself multiple times with the same cadence and word usage
- Characters with no real personality beyond the tropes they represent, could be replaced with any other romantasy main characters and it would make no difference
- Poor LGBTQIA+ representation (despite it being praised in multiple reviews)
- Because of all these issues, the book is 250 pages longer than it needs to be.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Confinement, Cursing, Death, Death of parent, Injury/Injury detail, Pregnancy, Rape, Alcohol, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Blood, Classism, Fire/Fire injury, Grief, Kidnapping, Medical content, Medical trauma, Miscarriage, Murder, Physical abuse, Stalking, and Torture
art_books_chemistry's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I absolutely loved every word of this book. Even though it's over 700 pages, there was no point where I wanted to stop reading and I definitely shorted myself on sleep a couple of nights when I lost myself in it.
Parker's world-building is exquisite. The world she crafted is deep and thorough as are her characters. I honestly cannot decide which of them I love more. There's a strong but flawed FMC, a giant teddy bear MMC plus beautiful, unique dragons. Plus even the side characters are equally as developed, even the ones we barely get to know in this book, clearly have fully developed back stories. I can't wait for the next installment to flesh them out further as well as the next phase of the plot. I guessed a couple of the twists right before we found out about them but they were very well done.
Highly recommend to any lover of high fantasy.
Parker's world-building is exquisite. The world she crafted is deep and thorough as are her characters. I honestly cannot decide which of them I love more. There's a strong but flawed FMC, a giant teddy bear MMC plus beautiful, unique dragons. Plus even the side characters are equally as developed, even the ones we barely get to know in this book, clearly have fully developed back stories. I can't wait for the next installment to flesh them out further as well as the next phase of the plot. I guessed a couple of the twists right before we found out about them but they were very well done.
Highly recommend to any lover of high fantasy.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcohol, Blood, Confinement, Cursing, Grief, Death of parent, Fire/Fire injury, Violence, Classism, Death, Gore, Injury/Injury detail, Murder, Sexual content, and Animal death
Moderate: Animal cruelty
Minor: Slavery, Abandonment, Pregnancy, and Vomit
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