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A review by rokinjaguar
The Waking Land by Callie Bates
Did not finish book. Stopped at 70%.
I really started off liking this book. Elanna’s internal struggles seemed complex and interesting, and I liked Jahan a lot! I had high hopes!
Unfortunately, Elanna’s internal struggles are just nonstop cycling the same thing, that I ended up getting really sick of it, and that led to me souring on the book as a whole. I liked how much the book focused on Elanna’s thought processes and feelings and psychology… until I didn’t anymore. Part of it was that Elanna was like a broken record, panicking internally about the same thing again and again. It also kind of felt like her thoughts/views sometimes didn’t fit in with the world/her history. For the most part I totally understood why she was the way she was, but there would also be parts where I felt like she felt a certain way bc the author wanted her to, not bc it made sense for her to feel that way. For example, she and this woman training to be a surgeon have a short conversation about how women are unfairly looked down on in STEM fields, essentially. It’s not that the sentiment is wrong or that they wouldn’t feel frustrated by it, but the way they talk about it feels very much like modern thoughts. Like they’re two women having a heart to heart at the corporate break room. It felt way too on the nose for the world building.
The closer I looked, the more the book fell flat, and I was so disappointed that I just didn’t want to read it anymore, it kept irritating me in small ways.
All that being said, there were some great ideas in there, and I adore Jahan. It just felt amateur to me. To be fair to the author, apparently it’s her debut novel. If she comes out with a new series a few years down the line, I may give her another shot, but not this series.
Unfortunately, Elanna’s internal struggles are just nonstop cycling the same thing, that I ended up getting really sick of it, and that led to me souring on the book as a whole. I liked how much the book focused on Elanna’s thought processes and feelings and psychology… until I didn’t anymore. Part of it was that Elanna was like a broken record, panicking internally about the same thing again and again. It also kind of felt like her thoughts/views sometimes didn’t fit in with the world/her history. For the most part I totally understood why she was the way she was, but there would also be parts where I felt like she felt a certain way bc the author wanted her to, not bc it made sense for her to feel that way. For example, she and this woman training to be a surgeon have a short conversation about how women are unfairly looked down on in STEM fields, essentially. It’s not that the sentiment is wrong or that they wouldn’t feel frustrated by it, but the way they talk about it feels very much like modern thoughts. Like they’re two women having a heart to heart at the corporate break room. It felt way too on the nose for the world building.
The closer I looked, the more the book fell flat, and I was so disappointed that I just didn’t want to read it anymore, it kept irritating me in small ways.
All that being said, there were some great ideas in there, and I adore Jahan. It just felt amateur to me. To be fair to the author, apparently it’s her debut novel. If she comes out with a new series a few years down the line, I may give her another shot, but not this series.