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A review by crofteereader
Shadow City by Francesca Flores
2.0
I'll admit I struggled with this one. I received an ARC of Diamond City at Yallfest last year and absolutely devoured it, enthralled by the assassins and awesome fight scenes pushing the plot relentlessly forward. In this one, however, we have bombs in the streets and melees and full-fledged battles, blowing the scope of the story wide open and it felt, to me, like it was full of holes.
The addition of magic in Aina's arsenal of weapons had me intrigued. I was ready to see how this would turn the tide. Except, she barely used it. It was more of a convenience than something that required effort and dedication - especially when the magic itself relies so heavily on faith (which Aina doesn't really have). And the tug of war between Aina and Kohl got to be very repetitive. Another issue is that we see very little of our side characters. Mirran is mentioned a few times but she only actually has like two speaking lines. Tannis, Raurie, and Lill seemed to have very little bearing on the actual plot. Ryuu and Teo act as sounding boards to organize Aina's thoughts and emotions. To me, it just felt very surface level.
Character injuries (even major ones like bullet wounds and burns) are negligible after they happened; like the whole book takes place over the course of maybe two weeks, so a bullet wound from day 3 should still be incredibly painful on day 10. Or specify that they healed with magic maybe? These same 6 characters are getting into knife and gun fights that last for like 8 hours almost daily and they're not sore or stiff or in huge amounts of pain? Come on. There was also one huge cop-out near the end that made me groan out loud; because it shouldn't have been possible.
It took me ages to read and I debated DNFing just because it didn't hold my attention. Luckily, I liked Diamond City enough that I didn't want to just give up. I would still give Flores another chance, but this book didn't do it for me.
{Thank you Wednesday Books and NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review; all thoughts are my own}
The addition of magic in Aina's arsenal of weapons had me intrigued. I was ready to see how this would turn the tide. Except, she barely used it. It was more of a convenience than something that required effort and dedication - especially when the magic itself relies so heavily on faith (which Aina doesn't really have). And the tug of war between Aina and Kohl got to be very repetitive. Another issue is that we see very little of our side characters. Mirran is mentioned a few times but she only actually has like two speaking lines. Tannis, Raurie, and Lill seemed to have very little bearing on the actual plot. Ryuu and Teo act as sounding boards to organize Aina's thoughts and emotions. To me, it just felt very surface level.
Character injuries (even major ones like bullet wounds and burns) are negligible after they happened; like the whole book takes place over the course of maybe two weeks, so a bullet wound from day 3 should still be incredibly painful on day 10. Or specify that they healed with magic maybe? These same 6 characters are getting into knife and gun fights that last for like 8 hours almost daily and they're not sore or stiff or in huge amounts of pain? Come on. There was also one huge cop-out near the end that made me groan out loud; because it shouldn't have been possible.
It took me ages to read and I debated DNFing just because it didn't hold my attention. Luckily, I liked Diamond City enough that I didn't want to just give up. I would still give Flores another chance, but this book didn't do it for me.
{Thank you Wednesday Books and NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review; all thoughts are my own}