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A review by everybody
Blood & Steel by Helen Scheuerer
Did not finish book.
From what I have read this is a simplistic, shallow, overt, and heavy-handed YA romance.
I am frequently baffled by how a story gets labeled "Adult" as the story and its depth is very clearly written for a young teenage audience. I know that the age-group labels of books are almost entirely based on the age of the protagonist, and rarely on the actual target audience for some absurd reason. But I am not any less baffled by it anyway.
I only made it 12% into the story so there might be a lot more depth and wisdom later on that subverts all these shallow tropes and clichées and we only start at this very naive and contained point.
But I honestly doubt it. There are quite a few other things wrong with the basic world-building. Scope and scale are all wrong. The MC is this unremarkable women in a culture in which women are oppressed. But she gets dragged in front of their leader like a naughty child to the school director. But at the same time this is supposed to be a kingdome that has been fighting an ongoing war with armies for years apparently. How does this leader take personal time to deal with a random young woman that had a knife exactly? The setting is a kingdom with armies and also a single small village where everyone knows each other at the same time. And this is just one example of many. None of the scale makes any sense.
And the flimsy justification for the oppression of women doesn't make a lick of sense either.
It's all just so contrived and full of contradiction that I just can not believe it will get any better which is why I ended it at 12%.
I have a hard time not ascribing this to incompetence or laziness.
Kudos to whomever did the marketing. Over 13k ratings is truly impressive for this waste of paper.
I am frequently baffled by how a story gets labeled "Adult" as the story and its depth is very clearly written for a young teenage audience. I know that the age-group labels of books are almost entirely based on the age of the protagonist, and rarely on the actual target audience for some absurd reason. But I am not any less baffled by it anyway.
I only made it 12% into the story so there might be a lot more depth and wisdom later on that subverts all these shallow tropes and clichées and we only start at this very naive and contained point.
But I honestly doubt it. There are quite a few other things wrong with the basic world-building. Scope and scale are all wrong. The MC is this unremarkable women in a culture in which women are oppressed. But she gets dragged in front of their leader like a naughty child to the school director. But at the same time this is supposed to be a kingdome that has been fighting an ongoing war with armies for years apparently. How does this leader take personal time to deal with a random young woman that had a knife exactly? The setting is a kingdom with armies and also a single small village where everyone knows each other at the same time. And this is just one example of many. None of the scale makes any sense.
And the flimsy justification for the oppression of women doesn't make a lick of sense either.
It's all just so contrived and full of contradiction that I just can not believe it will get any better which is why I ended it at 12%.
I have a hard time not ascribing this to incompetence or laziness.
Kudos to whomever did the marketing. Over 13k ratings is truly impressive for this waste of paper.