A review by debthebookworm
Reign of the Fallen by Sarah Glenn Marsh

Did not finish book.

1.0

The blurb promises action, mystery, a little adventure, but at page 216 it hadn't delivered a good enough fraction of it. Instead, we have pages upon pages of a main character drinking potions or craving potions to forget her dead boyfriend and hallucinating until her friends force her into pages of detox. All the stuff that would be interesting is left to characters we don't get to see doing the brunt of the work the main character should be doing. On top of that, it seems she's inexplicably falling for her boyfriend's sister in the middle of her detox while, again, her friends are the ones doing the action, mystery, adventure, so we don't get to see it. I feel like all the excitement will be crammed into the last 100 pages, and I could no longer sit through an unmoving plot to get to it.

I was also unable to connect with anything Odessa was feeling, possibly because things happened so quickly. She killed her boyfriend's killer Shade in the blink of an eye. A whole search for the necromancer controlling the Shades only received a "the day after we went searching," before the detox pages began.

I also don't understand the shrouding of the dead so they don't turn into Shades. Are the shrouds magic? There's no explanation of that.

I don't think I've ever gotten this far into a book I couldn't finish. I was really rooting for a turn, but I didn't see one coming soon.