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mahjabinmeem 's review for:
Nevernight
by Jay Kristoff
I feel terribly betrayed by this book. A young female protagonist, a quest for revenge, a school of assassins…sounds like a recipe for the perfect fantasy. My expectations were sky-high. AND THEN THEY ALL CAME CRUSHING DOWN AFTER I READ THE FIRST 20 PAGES.
What exactly is this supposed to be? With the cursing and gory details, I reckon it was geared towards the adult readers. But as my brilliant friend Shimin has so aptly, it reads like it was written for goddamn 13 year olds. It was appalling.
The author choked down descriptions down my throat. The brutal abuse of adjectives made me gag. He can tell you how the protagonist walks down the hall in 37 different ways. She lethally sashayed down the hall with her not-cat on her tail. She moved like shadows, like a swaying tree in a breeze. She almost ran, but not quite. She sighed and burped and breathed and farted and walked. WE GET IT! SHE FUCKING WALKED DOWN THE HALL.
His obsession with overusing similes and metaphors is alarming. I am no stranger to flowery prose. Most of the time, they do lean on the purple side for me, but I persevere. But THIS! O dear readers, the prose is not even purple here, it’s bruised black and yellow. I had to read some paragraphs multiple times just to get an inkling of what was actually happening. After a while things got so painful, I started to skip lines. But even then, I couldn't escape the horrors below.
“The girl felt the words in her chest. In the deepest, darkest place, where the hope children breathe and adults mourn withered and fell away, floating like ashes on the wind.”
“Tric gave another half-hearted stab, but the beast had forgotten its quarry entirely, great eyes rolling as it flipped over and over, dragging its bulk back below the sand, howling like a dog who's just returned home from a hard turn's work to find another hound in his kennel, smoking his cigarillos and in bed with his wife.”
“Mia sighed. Took her temper by the earlobe and pulled it to heel.”
WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN!?
Our main protagonist Mia Corvere has as much personality as a sack of potatoes. She is as unoriginal and clichéd as it comes. There was no character development whatsoever among the characters. O, the mighty assassin Mia Corvere is so tough and invincible. Why doesn’t that surprise me? The customary nemesis only exists to hiss and spit at our protagonist. The betrayal and twist at the end is about as twisty as a spaghetti stick.
And the footnotes! O the bloody footnotes dear reader. Let me tell you one thing, using footnotes for world building is perhaps the laziest writing I’ve ever witnessed. They kept taking me out of the story (to be fair, I was never really IN the story, but you know what I mean). The random anecdotal bits served no purpose. That’s not how you build the lore and mythology of a world. It was so fucking tedious.
The only reason I give it two stars is because the bones of the story is actually interesting and that made want to finish the first book at least. The over-the-top melodrama and fluff made it infinitely hard. I continued through it doggedly, this mindboggling boring and unreadable monstrosity, with sheer willpower. Never again.
What exactly is this supposed to be? With the cursing and gory details, I reckon it was geared towards the adult readers. But as my brilliant friend Shimin has so aptly, it reads like it was written for goddamn 13 year olds. It was appalling.
The author choked down descriptions down my throat. The brutal abuse of adjectives made me gag. He can tell you how the protagonist walks down the hall in 37 different ways. She lethally sashayed down the hall with her not-cat on her tail. She moved like shadows, like a swaying tree in a breeze. She almost ran, but not quite. She sighed and burped and breathed and farted and walked. WE GET IT! SHE FUCKING WALKED DOWN THE HALL.
His obsession with overusing similes and metaphors is alarming. I am no stranger to flowery prose. Most of the time, they do lean on the purple side for me, but I persevere. But THIS! O dear readers, the prose is not even purple here, it’s bruised black and yellow. I had to read some paragraphs multiple times just to get an inkling of what was actually happening. After a while things got so painful, I started to skip lines. But even then, I couldn't escape the horrors below.
“The girl felt the words in her chest. In the deepest, darkest place, where the hope children breathe and adults mourn withered and fell away, floating like ashes on the wind.”
“Tric gave another half-hearted stab, but the beast had forgotten its quarry entirely, great eyes rolling as it flipped over and over, dragging its bulk back below the sand, howling like a dog who's just returned home from a hard turn's work to find another hound in his kennel, smoking his cigarillos and in bed with his wife.”
“Mia sighed. Took her temper by the earlobe and pulled it to heel.”
WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN!?
Our main protagonist Mia Corvere has as much personality as a sack of potatoes. She is as unoriginal and clichéd as it comes. There was no character development whatsoever among the characters. O, the mighty assassin Mia Corvere is so tough and invincible. Why doesn’t that surprise me? The customary nemesis only exists to hiss and spit at our protagonist. The betrayal and twist at the end is about as twisty as a spaghetti stick.
And the footnotes! O the bloody footnotes dear reader. Let me tell you one thing, using footnotes for world building is perhaps the laziest writing I’ve ever witnessed. They kept taking me out of the story (to be fair, I was never really IN the story, but you know what I mean). The random anecdotal bits served no purpose. That’s not how you build the lore and mythology of a world. It was so fucking tedious.
The only reason I give it two stars is because the bones of the story is actually interesting and that made want to finish the first book at least. The over-the-top melodrama and fluff made it infinitely hard. I continued through it doggedly, this mindboggling boring and unreadable monstrosity, with sheer willpower. Never again.