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A review by elainabear
Strike the Zither by Joan He
4.0
3.5*
My rating is very much my personal feelings. I do believe that the book itself is actually very very good. However, for me personally, I just really hated the main twist. (SPOILERS)
The twist that Zephyr is actually a God just threw me so far off. It created such a disconnect from the story and I suddenly felt like the stakes weren't even that high because Zephyr always had a way out of her situation. There wasn't any tension anymore if Zephyr would survive because she's immortal, so the entire time after she returned, I just became less and less interested in the war. Now, using gods as main characters of a story can actually be a really good concept. My favorite book of all time uses this concept. But what's different here is that the gods are actually so much larger than life and playing with mortals so much lower than them that they just seem way too overpowered. In other books using gods as protagonists, the author will usually pit the god against another god, or another being as powerful as them. But here, Zephyr's main enemy is a mortal, and Zephyr herself just knows so much extra information from just being a god. It was hard to continue to care about the rest of the cast because Zephyr was the main focus and she just knew what to do at almost every turn.
My rating is very much my personal feelings. I do believe that the book itself is actually very very good. However, for me personally, I just really hated the main twist. (SPOILERS)
The twist that Zephyr is actually a God just threw me so far off. It created such a disconnect from the story and I suddenly felt like the stakes weren't even that high because Zephyr always had a way out of her situation. There wasn't any tension anymore if Zephyr would survive because she's immortal, so the entire time after she returned, I just became less and less interested in the war. Now, using gods as main characters of a story can actually be a really good concept. My favorite book of all time uses this concept. But what's different here is that the gods are actually so much larger than life and playing with mortals so much lower than them that they just seem way too overpowered. In other books using gods as protagonists, the author will usually pit the god against another god, or another being as powerful as them. But here, Zephyr's main enemy is a mortal, and Zephyr herself just knows so much extra information from just being a god. It was hard to continue to care about the rest of the cast because Zephyr was the main focus and she just knew what to do at almost every turn.