A review by madelegg
A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows

slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.75

This one's so hard to rate because when it was good, it was really good, but there's like a good 200 pages of shit that could've been cut out of this damn book. I've never seen an author be so good at character writing and abandon that for a mystery plot that was absolutely beat to death with how much the book focused on it over the characters' interpersonal relationships. The end of this book is a banger and the romance, when it actually happens, is excellent, romantic, and the couple has great chemistry. But you have to weed through 300 pages of Velasin generating useless theories about whodunit only for the culprit to be captured by chance, and holy shit did they go hard on these theories and logic trails and analyses of the situation, only for it to all be a waste of time!! Quite literally if you'd cut out every single bit of Velasin and Cae working with the guards and hunting for clues kinda and talking about "what if the culprit is ralian" "what if they didn't know vel married cae" "what if what if what if" IT WOULDN'T ACTUALLY CHANGE THE BOOK AT ALL because of how they discover the culprit in the end! So slogging through all that boring shit was basically for nothing! The editor should've gone through this book with a fat tipped sharpie.

As angry as I am about it wasting so much of my time with the plot bloating, the characters were just spot on and excellent, every dialogue exchange was killer, and I was invested in almost every main character. This book would have soared if it cared more about characters than plot. The two just didn't mesh right.


Oh but my real biggest complaint is how poorly the manufacturers bound this book. Brand new copy and I had huge chunks of pages falling out of the back because they were poorly glued. Do better, Tor. This is a fucking disgrace.
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