Take a photo of a barcode or cover
mistressofroses 's review for:
The Court of Miracles
by Kester Grant
Let me just preface this that, like many people who picked up this book, I am both a fan of Guild-of-Thieves books and of Les Mis... and where this book really stumbles is its attempt to keep the training wheels of Les Mis on to completely avoid doing things like characterization or description (it would have been a nice thing to find a happy medium between the high school play drawing of Paris on butcher paper of this book and Hugo's "oh I see you're here for 400 pages about architecture") while also not using any of it to its full potential-- Eponine becomes Nina, Cosette becomes Ettie. The author concedes that she wrote this because she hates Marius, and her decision just not to include him was the right move.
Especially when you find out that gender-swapped Javert is just so she can now comfortably have the ruthlessness regarding Valjean be because, oh, that's right, she's a scorned woman pissed off that Valjean broke her heart. Not that this was expanded upon either beyond just giving Nina her "I am so smrt" epiphany moment by meeting Javert for all of 30 seconds and sorting this out. For all the nothing both her and Valjean did, they may as well had not been there at all.
Apparently, Eponine's "deserving better" was having every boy have a crush on her instead of the other way around, to lose the intriguing conflict between her and Cosette, and being a cool thief who still loses all the time because of how obsessed she is with protecting Ettie? Sure, okay.
By the time I got to the last chapters, I just wanted it to be over. There's one brilliant scene somewhere in the middle of the book, but the swift descent downhill was a rough one.
And yeah, making Javert a woman for the sole purpose of making her characterization the most one dimensional bullshit ever was not the move. If it hadn't been near the end already I would have DNF'd it right there.
Especially when you find out that gender-swapped Javert is just so she can now comfortably have the ruthlessness regarding Valjean be because, oh, that's right, she's a scorned woman pissed off that Valjean broke her heart. Not that this was expanded upon either beyond just giving Nina her "I am so smrt" epiphany moment by meeting Javert for all of 30 seconds and sorting this out. For all the nothing both her and Valjean did, they may as well had not been there at all.
Apparently, Eponine's "deserving better" was having every boy have a crush on her instead of the other way around, to lose the intriguing conflict between her and Cosette, and being a cool thief who still loses all the time because of how obsessed she is with protecting Ettie? Sure, okay.
By the time I got to the last chapters, I just wanted it to be over. There's one brilliant scene somewhere in the middle of the book, but the swift descent downhill was a rough one.
And yeah, making Javert a woman for the sole purpose of making her characterization the most one dimensional bullshit ever was not the move. If it hadn't been near the end already I would have DNF'd it right there.