A review by wardenred
Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland

adventurous dark tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Welcome to being friends with Jane McKeene, the hardest job in the world.

I really wish I liked this book more than I actually did. Because there was so much cool stuff here! The setting itself is beatuifully executed: all the historical details merged seamlessly with the added element of zombies, and all that light shed on the kind of people history loves to forget. The cast of characters is wonderfully diverse and pretty much everyone gets a moment to shine. There are plenty of little scenes that absolutely beg to play out on a tv screen. I loved the inclusion of Katherine as a narrator in her own right; I feel her chapters added a lot to the story, especially in the first part when Jane is largely out of action and mostly gets to be heartbroken over at least two different people. I liked every single action sequence.

But at the same time, all this awesomeness just never clicked into a solid story for me. The pacing is super rocky. There's that entire first half where nothing much happens until the plot twist in the middle. There are two absolutely beautiful chapters at the beginning of the first half (seriously, my favorite in the whole book and possibly the whole series) that carry such promise about all the change that happened to the characters, and then the story starts to meander again. A lot of the really important events happen either entirely off-screen or are jumbled into something very short; meanwhile, what feels like merely connective tissue drags on for pages and pages. There are numerous plot threads, including some coming all the way from the first book, that are underdeveloped or left hanging. 

I frequently react to novellas with, "I wish this was a full-scale novel." With this book, my reaction is the opposite: I wish this was a novella. Or a string of short stories. Maybe all those meaningful parts would shine brighter if they weren't bogged down in all the rockiness!
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