readingmalone 's review for:

Nameless by Lili St. Crow

2.0

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I am always up for a fairy-tale retelling and I thought that the premise of this story sounded interesting and like a new take. And, well, it technically was. The main issue, as other reviewers are saying, is that the book is trying to juggle too many things at once and it drops the ball on a lot of things. A lot of the terminology is unexplained and left for the reader to interpret and the history of this world is unclear. At first it seems as if 'magic' type people were revealed after WWI and history appropriately changed after that, but it doesn't explain the change in holiday traditions prior to that. There's a lot that goes unexplained and I was hoping that Cami would be a non-magic person in a smaller sect of magic instead of a semi-magic person in a magic world with humans kind of in it. The characters weren't developed near enough, the world wasn't built to a good standard, and the connections to the original fairy tale (while good) didn't fit into the rest of the story well enough. Everything, like a broken mirror, was too jagged. I enjoyed it, but probably won't be adding it to my collection.