Take a photo of a barcode or cover
*I was provided with an ARC of this book by the publisher, in exchange for my honest opinion.
This sounded like it was going to be an incredibly interesting and mysterious story and I was looking forward to exploring it. However, only a little way in, I quickly realised that this book, unfortunately wasn't for me. Honestly, I wanted to DNF at several points. I just couldn't get into this world, everything from the characters, to the magic and plot just seemed very superficial. It felt more like a middle grade book, apart from the random inserts of strong language or a character being 'hard'.
The characters were okay, but that was about it. None of them really stood out or made me feel any real emotion towards them, so I was just passive whenever anything happened. I didn't particularly like Kane either, for someone who didn't know what was going on, he was hellbent on not following people's advice, despite it resulting in dire consequences most of the time. He was very quick to judge people for their mistakes, even though he made just as many. He also didn't actually have any real personality that I could grasp. And the other characters weren't that well realised either, and as Kane was frustrated with them for most of the novel, it was hard not to feel the same.
And I champion diversity, but here, the diversity didn't feel naturally filtered in. Kane was gay and this was all I kept getting about him, even though there was clearly a theme in the novel that this shouldn't define someone, which was ironic. At random points in the book there would be talk of the difficulties one faced in the world by being gay and this was linked to the idea of the reveries and the desire for gay people to escape reality. I think that the idea here was great, but was executed quite poorly. I do believe that this is an own voices novel, which I love and it made my expectations a bit higher, but there was no real depth to the ideas and issues raised. And with the villian, the focus was more on them being a drag queen than their intentions, which was disappointing.
I'm not actually sure what the plot was, as everything was a bit disjointed. It was the typical story of someone not being aware of the magical abilities they possessed and then discovering that they're in fact the most powerful one of their kind. I wouldn't of minded the cliches, because I thought that the reveries were going to make this stand out, but it was confusing and underdeveloped. I truly liked the idea of the reveries and why people's manifested as they did, but there wasn't anything of real substance behind it, and how they formed and were unravelled was hard to wrap my head around. I actually ended up skimming the majority of the book and didn't feel like I missed out on a lot of what was happening, so that suggested that there was a lot of unnecessary scenes.
Overall, I'm quite disappointed with this book as I think that it had quite a lot of potential. It was just that things seemed to be reversed, the characters were too simplistic and the magic was too complicated, whereas I would of loved the characters to be more fleshed out and for the magic to not be as confusing. And the diversity in this is probably one of its biggest attractions, but the way the book explored it didn't work in my opinion. A lot of others enjoyed this book, so it seems that it either works for you or it doesn't, therefore I wouldn't deter someone from picking it up.
This sounded like it was going to be an incredibly interesting and mysterious story and I was looking forward to exploring it. However, only a little way in, I quickly realised that this book, unfortunately wasn't for me. Honestly, I wanted to DNF at several points. I just couldn't get into this world, everything from the characters, to the magic and plot just seemed very superficial. It felt more like a middle grade book, apart from the random inserts of strong language or a character being 'hard'.
The characters were okay, but that was about it. None of them really stood out or made me feel any real emotion towards them, so I was just passive whenever anything happened. I didn't particularly like Kane either, for someone who didn't know what was going on, he was hellbent on not following people's advice, despite it resulting in dire consequences most of the time. He was very quick to judge people for their mistakes, even though he made just as many. He also didn't actually have any real personality that I could grasp. And the other characters weren't that well realised either, and as Kane was frustrated with them for most of the novel, it was hard not to feel the same.
And I champion diversity, but here, the diversity didn't feel naturally filtered in. Kane was gay and this was all I kept getting about him, even though there was clearly a theme in the novel that this shouldn't define someone, which was ironic. At random points in the book there would be talk of the difficulties one faced in the world by being gay and this was linked to the idea of the reveries and the desire for gay people to escape reality. I think that the idea here was great, but was executed quite poorly. I do believe that this is an own voices novel, which I love and it made my expectations a bit higher, but there was no real depth to the ideas and issues raised. And with the villian, the focus was more on them being a drag queen than their intentions, which was disappointing.
I'm not actually sure what the plot was, as everything was a bit disjointed. It was the typical story of someone not being aware of the magical abilities they possessed and then discovering that they're in fact the most powerful one of their kind. I wouldn't of minded the cliches, because I thought that the reveries were going to make this stand out, but it was confusing and underdeveloped. I truly liked the idea of the reveries and why people's manifested as they did, but there wasn't anything of real substance behind it, and how they formed and were unravelled was hard to wrap my head around. I actually ended up skimming the majority of the book and didn't feel like I missed out on a lot of what was happening, so that suggested that there was a lot of unnecessary scenes.
Overall, I'm quite disappointed with this book as I think that it had quite a lot of potential. It was just that things seemed to be reversed, the characters were too simplistic and the magic was too complicated, whereas I would of loved the characters to be more fleshed out and for the magic to not be as confusing. And the diversity in this is probably one of its biggest attractions, but the way the book explored it didn't work in my opinion. A lot of others enjoyed this book, so it seems that it either works for you or it doesn't, therefore I wouldn't deter someone from picking it up.