A review by mooniebaby24
Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older

2.0

I wanted to like this book so bad but whew was it poorly written and at times just plain boring. Which sucks, because the plot is fun, it was quick-paced (quite a lot was happening at one time, actually.) and the characters were decent enough/familiar, but I just couldn't get into it. One thing that bothered me the most/took me out of it most of the time was the dialogue. It was clunky, with most of it being AAVE and Brooklyn/NY slang. As a black woman who code-switches and speaks in AAVE often, some of it just did not make any sense, nor would it sound natural. This probably would’ve just flowed better as a movie/TV show. Maybe I'll come back to this book/series someday with lower expectations, but I doubt it.