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A review by kmj91
Hunter's Death by Michelle West
3.0
3 stars, I like it but my feelings are complicated
So I don't think this is a 3-star book in terms of quality, in many ways it is an exceptional and epic book with amazing characters and a wonderfully tragic tone that works marvelously. So what's the issue? Well, I've read this before. Specifically I've read exactly half of this story in House Name. See this book takes place concurrently with House Name and half of the POV sections in this book belong to Jewel Markess, the main character of the House War series. She also gets half of this book and her sections here are basically the same as her sections of House Name with the occasional tweak which makes for kind of a frustrating reading experience. If you read House Name fairly recently, as I did, you get the nagging feeling that most of this book is rereading but just enough is different that you feel weird about skipping those sections and the sections aren't discrete chapters so you can't easily tell what could be skipped over at a glance and even if you do suss it all out, skipping around really ruins the flow of the novel as important information is still being delivered in the sections you've already read. It's a very frustrating reading experience and I wish West had figured out how to separate these viewpoints a little more when she revisited Jewel in the House War series so they didn't feel so redundant. It's a good book but one I'm not sure how to recommend.
So I don't think this is a 3-star book in terms of quality, in many ways it is an exceptional and epic book with amazing characters and a wonderfully tragic tone that works marvelously. So what's the issue? Well, I've read this before. Specifically I've read exactly half of this story in House Name. See this book takes place concurrently with House Name and half of the POV sections in this book belong to Jewel Markess, the main character of the House War series. She also gets half of this book and her sections here are basically the same as her sections of House Name with the occasional tweak which makes for kind of a frustrating reading experience. If you read House Name fairly recently, as I did, you get the nagging feeling that most of this book is rereading but just enough is different that you feel weird about skipping those sections and the sections aren't discrete chapters so you can't easily tell what could be skipped over at a glance and even if you do suss it all out, skipping around really ruins the flow of the novel as important information is still being delivered in the sections you've already read. It's a very frustrating reading experience and I wish West had figured out how to separate these viewpoints a little more when she revisited Jewel in the House War series so they didn't feel so redundant. It's a good book but one I'm not sure how to recommend.