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kgrey2 's review for:
A Dawn of Onyx
by Kate Golden
adventurous
dark
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
*spoilers spoilers spoilers*
This book was very ACOTAR-lite. It could have been a really good story but it feels like the author just couldn’t decide what plot ideas she wanted to focus on the most and instead spent a little too much time writing about everything. Want your MMC to pretend to be someone else but is actually the king? Sure add that in for the first portion, but also make him a secret fae prince and shape shifter that we don’t learn about until the end. FMC is a healer? Okay let’s put her in an apothecary but don’t really talk about her healing more than three or four people the entire book. Also don’t describe her work space at or any real detail relevant to story building until suddenly there needs to be a window for someone to jump out of. Can’t explain why the FMC has special powers even when the world is apparently full of witches that can do kind of the same things? Just make her a full blooded fae born magically from two humans! That really got to me shaking my head. The first book in a series should definitely have world building in it but this felt very rushed with so many things not really fleshed out or explained.
I hate to rip on a book but I really wanted to like the characters and was very disappointed at how weirdly their personalities were developed. I’m not really a diehard SJM fan, but I think she did a better job at developing Rhys’s character to be a softy with a cruel outer persona than what happened with Kane. To me there needed to be a little bit more work put into his character to show the turmoil he faced when making horrible decisions, because by the end of the book he still seemed as if he enjoyed a certain amount of violence rather than feel guilty about it.
This book was very ACOTAR-lite. It could have been a really good story but it feels like the author just couldn’t decide what plot ideas she wanted to focus on the most and instead spent a little too much time writing about everything. Want your MMC to pretend to be someone else but is actually the king? Sure add that in for the first portion, but also make him a secret fae prince and shape shifter that we don’t learn about until the end. FMC is a healer? Okay let’s put her in an apothecary but don’t really talk about her healing more than three or four people the entire book. Also don’t describe her work space at or any real detail relevant to story building until suddenly there needs to be a window for someone to jump out of. Can’t explain why the FMC has special powers even when the world is apparently full of witches that can do kind of the same things? Just make her a full blooded fae born magically from two humans! That really got to me shaking my head. The first book in a series should definitely have world building in it but this felt very rushed with so many things not really fleshed out or explained.
I hate to rip on a book but I really wanted to like the characters and was very disappointed at how weirdly their personalities were developed. I’m not really a diehard SJM fan, but I think she did a better job at developing Rhys’s character to be a softy with a cruel outer persona than what happened with Kane. To me there needed to be a little bit more work put into his character to show the turmoil he faced when making horrible decisions, because by the end of the book he still seemed as if he enjoyed a certain amount of violence rather than feel guilty about it.