A review by wine_and_dine
Masters of Death by Olivie Blake

adventurous funny hopeful lighthearted mysterious fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.0

The game requires the players to torture each other with their own memories. The only way to win is if you have nothing to loose/everything to gain. The winner is the person with no regrets and who truly knows themselves.

Imaging grabbing a thesaurus every time you thought a word was to commonly used, but creating a writing style that is very engaging, with comical characters and witty exchanges - that is basically this book. There was a lot of unnecessary language, but the concept of the game was so interesting, and all the joy and emotions the characters expressed really pushed  “humanity is a gift” theme of the book.

The ending, however, was too perfectly rounded off - there is no open ending which fell flat considering the rest of the story was very fun. I love mystery surrounding the end of a story, and I was left with nothing to question myself over which was disappointing.

Would probably have given 5* if i was a few years younger when i read this:

• In “the game”, the stakes became so high and people kept losing in such a short amount of time the final goal became less meaningful.
• The unraveling plot was extremely predictable - the spoiler was easy to guess, so all the final plot points were not shocking at all. 
• The semantics of the meaning behind characters actions comes up a lot and is a bit tedious
  eg Death regrets fox - not regret raising him but regrets underestimating him, which then caused fox harm, therefore deaths regret is felt because of fox’s hurt(p 367)
  - good morals for a child's book, however this is more YA so the semantics were a bit annoying.