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kylpon 's review for:
Bitter Medicine
by Mia Tsai
2.5 stars?
This really did take me a month to read and felt so much longer than 400 pages. While much of it is well written I found this story didn't keep my attention very well. It seemed whenever something fascinating would happen the story would get sidetracked elsewhere and therefore so would I.
The bits of lore and world building we got were fascinating but I wanted more. More about glyphs, what is in inks to give them different power levels, the various types of power, the jobs of agents and spies. Instead I felt like I was thrown into the story and supposed to know things. It is explained at the end of the book but all the untranslated bits of text got a bit old. If it was only a few times that would have been fine and still proved the point the author was trying to get across. How often it is done just makes reading it annoying and hard to tell if the reader is missing something important.
I love the idea of magic through glyphs and runes. I like the importance of family and how following the set path can destroy a person. I enjoy assassin teams or fixers in this case. I love the combination of magic and medicine. The uses of qi for healing and different techniques. Mythical beings yes please. But all of it together plus so much more meant there was too much going on and nothing gets fleshed out. There are a bunch of plots and subplots that never really get finished.
All this being said, it wasn't a terrible book. There are so many good ideas and the characters are interesting enough. Overall though, it just didn't work for me.
This really did take me a month to read and felt so much longer than 400 pages. While much of it is well written I found this story didn't keep my attention very well. It seemed whenever something fascinating would happen the story would get sidetracked elsewhere and therefore so would I.
The bits of lore and world building we got were fascinating but I wanted more. More about glyphs, what is in inks to give them different power levels, the various types of power, the jobs of agents and spies. Instead I felt like I was thrown into the story and supposed to know things. It is explained at the end of the book but all the untranslated bits of text got a bit old. If it was only a few times that would have been fine and still proved the point the author was trying to get across. How often it is done just makes reading it annoying and hard to tell if the reader is missing something important.
I love the idea of magic through glyphs and runes. I like the importance of family and how following the set path can destroy a person. I enjoy assassin teams or fixers in this case. I love the combination of magic and medicine. The uses of qi for healing and different techniques. Mythical beings yes please. But all of it together plus so much more meant there was too much going on and nothing gets fleshed out. There are a bunch of plots and subplots that never really get finished.
Spoiler
Oberon is really just going to let them live in peace? What happened to the younger brother? Why did Tony give in and go back to the family and everything he hates? The parents are leaving her alone with her knowledge that they want?All this being said, it wasn't a terrible book. There are so many good ideas and the characters are interesting enough. Overall though, it just didn't work for me.