oglopfabool 's review for:

Aetherbound by E.K. Johnston

1.0

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This was horrible. I love sci fi, I love dark fantasy, but this ain’t it. Tons of issues right off the get go and reading reviews, it only got worse. There’s a reason there’s so many low ratings and many DNF. It’s like the author took the horrible treatment that Harry Potter received and upped it up a notch. Main character gets punished for minor things, being put in darkness and isolation, is told she’s useless after spending the first pages of the book emphasizing there’s always work to be done, but this is happening when the character is 5. Family talks about just letting her be killed, even having a pet where the captain doesn’t want to try and save her as she almost dies. She’s “useless” but can changes genes and ever offers to work with the plants and start studying them so she can change their genes to produce more, but they just say “no the plants are fine the way they are” BUT THE WHOLE COUNTING CALORIES AND FOOD RATIONING IS THE MAJOR PLOT FO THIS??????? it just wanted to hammer it in that the character is experiencing cruelty, but guess what? She doesn’t really respond to the treatment. She just deals with it. No emotional trauma, no insight to how she’s reacting, and she just accepts it.

Pacing was terrible as well. It focuses so much on the treatment of a child before she’s older, yet the book isn’t that big. Why? Why not just mention her horrible life experiences as memories? Nah ok we gatta live through it to build up to forced pregnancies and men owning women. Oki