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eveningreverie 's review for:
Five Broken Blades
by Mai Corland
adventurous
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
This is really bad. Like... not even hate-read level bad. This is just an awful, really badly done book, and I'm honestly shocked it has so much publisher support.
Reading this book established a couple things for me. 1: romantasy probably isn’t my genre, 2: I cannot stand books that provide exposition whenever it’s convenient, and 3: Red Tower is possibly the least discerning publisher I have had the displeasure of reading from.
The writing in this was frankly atrocious. My first introduction to a character was “I run my delicate hand through the grass. It is beautiful, but sharp. Like me.”
Dude.
The storytelling craft in this simply does not exist. There’s no established world building, only things that are mentioned and then immediately explained to the reader, even up until the final chapter. A character will mention something, and then there will be a paragraph explaining what that thing is, and then the dialogue will continue. Instalove defines every single character pairing. There is little to no scenic detail. Perhaps most beguiling of all: this entire story feels like a sequel set up. One of the core tenets of storytelling posits that one should start a story as close to the end as possible, and—frankly—the sequel set-up sounds like a much better story than the one I just read.
Maybe I’m being too harsh, because I did fly through this in just a few days, but I don’t think I could recommend this to any of my friends, much less people in the need of a good adult fantasy read. Shifting POVs can be done correctly, but in a story about everyone not being able to trust each other, dramatic irony simply falls flat. I know what everyone wants. The only lies are white lies that the character chooses not to tell to the reader, which entirely goes against the nature of a first person POV. The world is barely acknowledged besides surface level, broad-strokes description, leaving me with nearly nothing to hold onto from this world or desire to see again. Character voices either all sound the same or come and go with the whims of the author suddenly and in such a way that knocks me immediately out of whatever immersion may have been built up (Royo, I’m looking at you; why does your accent come and go so often?!).
This is just not good. Save yourself the money and force yourself from the admittedly beautiful binding. It’s unfortunately the only good thing about this book.
Reading this book established a couple things for me. 1: romantasy probably isn’t my genre, 2: I cannot stand books that provide exposition whenever it’s convenient, and 3: Red Tower is possibly the least discerning publisher I have had the displeasure of reading from.
The writing in this was frankly atrocious. My first introduction to a character was “I run my delicate hand through the grass. It is beautiful, but sharp. Like me.”
Dude.
The storytelling craft in this simply does not exist. There’s no established world building, only things that are mentioned and then immediately explained to the reader, even up until the final chapter. A character will mention something, and then there will be a paragraph explaining what that thing is, and then the dialogue will continue. Instalove defines every single character pairing. There is little to no scenic detail. Perhaps most beguiling of all: this entire story feels like a sequel set up. One of the core tenets of storytelling posits that one should start a story as close to the end as possible, and—frankly—the sequel set-up sounds like a much better story than the one I just read.
Maybe I’m being too harsh, because I did fly through this in just a few days, but I don’t think I could recommend this to any of my friends, much less people in the need of a good adult fantasy read. Shifting POVs can be done correctly, but in a story about everyone not being able to trust each other, dramatic irony simply falls flat. I know what everyone wants. The only lies are white lies that the character chooses not to tell to the reader, which entirely goes against the nature of a first person POV. The world is barely acknowledged besides surface level, broad-strokes description, leaving me with nearly nothing to hold onto from this world or desire to see again. Character voices either all sound the same or come and go with the whims of the author suddenly and in such a way that knocks me immediately out of whatever immersion may have been built up (Royo, I’m looking at you; why does your accent come and go so often?!).
This is just not good. Save yourself the money and force yourself from the admittedly beautiful binding. It’s unfortunately the only good thing about this book.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Gore, Sexual assault, Murder
Minor: Genocide, Rape