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meganleighr 's review for:
House of Pounding Hearts
by Olivia Wildenstein
5 ⭐️for the world.
-855 ⭐️ for character development.
The world building is great! I really enjoy the world but good lord do I hate most of the characters. Fal takes an entire mile of steps backwards, especially at the beginning and her character makes choices that I can not understand how anyone with a little bit of sense would make. And we’re expected to want her to be a queen and help rule?
Her motivation for choices she makes facilitates back and forth in the story so it’s never really super clear why she does what she does but also, no matter what, it’s stupid. Of COURSE you wouldn’t be looked on with open arms when going to fae country after just killing a fae king? And given HOW murderous the fae kings have shown them to be, how could anyone not expect going to stay with her friends would be putting them under higher scrutiny? Like????
Additionally Lorcan is no better. He doesn’t tell Fal a lot of what’s happening. For Reasons. He purposefully keeps things from her to keep her safe but also not telling her things makes her make bad decisions? To me it came off as super manipulative like how an abuser can manipulate what their partner does by what they tell them for their own good.
Their coming together came out of nowhere. Fal was refusing to fall for Lorcan bc he was going to marry someone and refused to even ask him, Lorcan refusing to contradict her when she was wrong and then oh she finds out not rly and now they can totally have sex despite her being angry and upset with him for additional reasons before.
All in all this book felt like the author had the beginning of a story in the first book and (I can only hope) an ending of where she wanted to go in book three, but no idea how to string everything together in the middle and it felt like it.
Will I finish the series? Yes. I do enjoy the world building so I will.
Will I recommend it to anyone? No, I won’t.
-855 ⭐️ for character development.
The world building is great! I really enjoy the world but good lord do I hate most of the characters. Fal takes an entire mile of steps backwards, especially at the beginning and her character makes choices that I can not understand how anyone with a little bit of sense would make. And we’re expected to want her to be a queen and help rule?
Her motivation for choices she makes facilitates back and forth in the story so it’s never really super clear why she does what she does but also, no matter what, it’s stupid. Of COURSE you wouldn’t be looked on with open arms when going to fae country after just killing a fae king? And given HOW murderous the fae kings have shown them to be, how could anyone not expect going to stay with her friends would be putting them under higher scrutiny? Like????
Additionally Lorcan is no better. He doesn’t tell Fal a lot of what’s happening. For Reasons. He purposefully keeps things from her to keep her safe but also not telling her things makes her make bad decisions? To me it came off as super manipulative like how an abuser can manipulate what their partner does by what they tell them for their own good.
Their coming together came out of nowhere. Fal was refusing to fall for Lorcan bc he was going to marry someone and refused to even ask him, Lorcan refusing to contradict her when she was wrong and then oh she finds out not rly and now they can totally have sex despite her being angry and upset with him for additional reasons before.
All in all this book felt like the author had the beginning of a story in the first book and (I can only hope) an ending of where she wanted to go in book three, but no idea how to string everything together in the middle and it felt like it.
Will I finish the series? Yes. I do enjoy the world building so I will.
Will I recommend it to anyone? No, I won’t.