A review by cassanette
Buried Heart by Kate Elliott

3.0

"I can't move. I can't speak. I can't even cry. I have made my gamble and now I fear I have lost. I thought through every spin of the plan except this one: that Kal has a heart, and his heart is broken."

I have a complicated relationship with this book (and series). It made me cry, in the end, when I didn't think it could and the final 20% or so were very exciting. But that doesn't erase the fact that for the majority of this book I was bored and didn't care, and it took me a month to even decide I wanted to pick it up and wrap up the series.

I liked the conclusion itself. I think the ending will stay with me because it had some things that resonated with me. I find Kate Elliott's ending to be strong and this one was too, even if the series overall was a disappointment (and even if the ending itself, while impactful, is just very improbable in the way it unfurled).

The good: the family dynamic was given focus again at last and it was satisfying to see, we finally got to know Maraya better, Jes and Kal's relationship had some really good moments

(responsible sex, the disagreement over their beliefs),

Kal's overall storyline - I thought he really grew into his own.

The bad: the love triangle, some of the plot was unnaturally contrived in my opinion and some plot twists were... not surprising at all, there was a serious lack of compelling antagonists (the exception being Menoe, who I wanted to see more of) - in fact, the fact that the 'biggest' antagonists are entire countries that are just referred to as 'the enemy' did not help make things more interesting. Also, an off-screen siege?? What a disappointment, 0/10. Sieges are my favourite and that broke my heart.

The rest was pretty meh to me. What I will never stop saying is that Elliott excels at writing multi-PoV and her single narrator books just don't come close. They lack the same depth and emotional complexity to me. So in here, we only have Jes' point of view and we know she has a lot of strong opinions which may or may not be true, she misses a lot of things that don't immediately affect her. She's not exactly the definition of a reliable narrator, which isn't bad in itself but we're told things that we have no way to actually verify. For example, the Efeans just always sounded too good to be true.

Overall 3,5 stars (without the last 20% it would probably be 2 stars).