especiallyemma 's review for:

War Hour by Lauren Loscig

2.75

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 “No bravery without fear. No strength without struggle.”

here's the thing.

i've read better and i've read worse. i've read plenty of bad indie books to know what is bad. this is by far one of the better ones.

at first i didn't think war hour was so bad. it had a plot, characters, and funny bits of dialogue. that's all i could ask for. normally i don't even care about character development, but this time i did. lysta was constantly getting shoved around place to place, person to person. she acts like she's all tough and strong, but there's nothing special about her. she's got that mare barrow feeling to her.

normally i love side characters. they're the comic relief and sometimes the most interesting part of the story. i didn't love sar, bash, or any of the other heirs. if anything ardis was the most interesting but we know even less about him!

i wish the actual trialing was longer and more than just getting shoved into an arena with a beast. being the call to action point, main pitch point, the reason so many people die, and the whole reason people have powers, i would have innately expected the trial to be longer and more challenging. but it wasn't.

around the 25% point, where characters are revealed and plans explained, i found it a little confusing. i didn’t fully understand the reveals, but that just may be a reader error.

this book is slow for the first half of the story. i never understood why fantasy authors write 400+ page books, if they are unable to make the plot interesting… this book suffers from that problem.

in an ideal world, we would have a proper introduction to lysta and thoman’s relationship so that when it is taken away, it hurts more. bro literally doesn’t exist for 85% of the remaining book. i thought thoman was going to be like gale from hunger games, torryn was going to be like rhysand from acotar, and evander seemed to be tamlin/maven/dain (acotar, red queen, & fourth wing respectively). but since thoman is so far out of the picture, there’s no room for a love square and now there’s a love triangle. he returns for a bit at the end, but at that point its too late for a romance or something. i want to witness blindsided readers by the evander-tamlin-maven-dain reveal.

as i was reading, i was thinking i'd give this book 4 ⭐️, but in reality, the concept isn't that original. it's just like if you take hunger games, red queen, and throne of glass, shake it up a little, and get middle-of-the-road execution. it's all there, the bare bones, but the meat is plain. but since it's better than other books i've had the pleasure