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A review by king_lefay
The High Mountain Court by A.K. Mulford
adventurous
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
This is a very disappointing book (though the more I think on it the less I feel I should have expected anything from it). There are some interesting ideas, a few cool lines, but overall it doesn't deliver anything unique or impactful. The speedrunning of very basic worldbuilding, relationship moments, and character growth made it read like fanfiction. And I'm not dissing fanfiction, I love fanfiction, but the purpose of fanfiction oftentimes is to explore new ideas or experience more moments with characters we already love. We don't know the characters yet in this book, and there's constantly moments where our MC is like "and I realize now that they're my closest friends, true warriors and companions I would gladly die for" when we only met these characters literally four chapters earlier and there were no scenes to let the readers come to that conclusion ourselves. That's forgivable in fanfiction because we already know this is canon. The lack of depth to these "original" characters or time to develop any ideas made it so that any moments that were supposed to wring out any sort of emotional response fell very flat.
This book suffered greatly from a juvenile "telling-not-showing" writing style. I honestly might have forgiven the lazy trope-checklist that this "plot" amounted to if the writing had been entertaining or any kind of engaging. There is no tension, things are discovered, worried about, then resolved withing chapters of each other (and sometimes within the same chapter!!).
Overall I feel I could describe The High Mountain Court as the diluted essence of any SJM series, the hazy result of photocopying ACOTAR 20 times over, the plucking of all the fan favourite moments over the course of many novels and the shoving them into one far too short book.
I sincerely hope this author branches out and continues to develop their skills, but I may wait a couple years before I pick up another book by them.
This book suffered greatly from a juvenile "telling-not-showing" writing style. I honestly might have forgiven the lazy trope-checklist that this "plot" amounted to if the writing had been entertaining or any kind of engaging. There is no tension, things are discovered, worried about, then resolved withing chapters of each other (and sometimes within the same chapter!!).
Overall I feel I could describe The High Mountain Court as the diluted essence of any SJM series, the hazy result of photocopying ACOTAR 20 times over, the plucking of all the fan favourite moments over the course of many novels and the shoving them into one far too short book.
I sincerely hope this author branches out and continues to develop their skills, but I may wait a couple years before I pick up another book by them.