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A review by ayzorah
Potent by Kelsey Anne Lovelady, Tyler Wittkofsky
1.0
Thanks to Tea with Coffee Media and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC for this book.
I really don't like giving bad reviews but this book really didn't work for me at all. I wanted to DNF this from about 25% onwards, but mommy didn't raise a quitter so I kept at it, even though it was the biggest struggle for me to finish this.
This book can be summed up by 'man with goatee tries to win back ex-wife'. And something about a perfume and evil sister which was just so like .. pointless?
There was like 0 world building. These characters could have legit been anyone - I didn't feel the connection to the Oberon/Titania story much at all, other than the fact that they have their names. There was like barely any character description, it all fell compeletely flat. The characters had no chemistry with each other, there was simply no feeling at all; no emotion that came through to me. This book made me feel absolutely nothing other than insanely bored and just annoyed looking at the page count, considering how many pages I still had left and when I would finally be done with this disaster. The dialogue was cringey and annoying and went nowhere. Oberon's mental monologue about how much he hates himself - like what for? And I felt myself putting the book down during the 'spice' as I was so bored of it at that point I wanted to legit do anything else than read.
Also I understand there is an increasing trend for the use of non-standard pronouns in literature, even though it's been done before I've noticed it more and more recently. I am not going to open the can of worms of whether I think this is a good idea or not personally, but what I will say is that, in my opinion, the use of non-standard pronouns within text should be at least explained, in the sense that I was expecting some 'feeling' then of what the character is like; some actual character description, which in this case we didn't get.
I think representation is cool and all and having a platform like a book to introduce these things to society is a noble goal, but as a reader I didn't really know anything about these characters other than the guy has a goatee, the girl is an actress and a cheat and the butler is using some different pronouns and genuinly, that doesn't make for a good read.
The plot, something about some perfume left me completely unimpressed; in fact - I remember there was some Sailor Moon episode about 20 years back where there was some evil monster sucking out people's souls via the application of perfume - I would have a rehash of that story in a book as a plot any day over this drivel. And then why did the sister hate the FMC that much? Something about someone killing her family? But in the grand scheme of things; as in where they are all immortal beings and have lived for who knows how many years - surely that's not the worst thing that happened to her? Not saying it's not bad (losing a loved one always is), but logically; living that long and having everyone die around you, I'm sure you would be realistically become somehow 'accustomed' to it, or at least found ways to deal with it that it wouldn't lead you to wanting to 'destroy the world'; as it's put in the book? Dunno, it's all very flimsy to me.
The only good thing about this book is that it was short and that now that I have finished I never have to pick it up again.
I really don't like giving bad reviews but this book really didn't work for me at all. I wanted to DNF this from about 25% onwards, but mommy didn't raise a quitter so I kept at it, even though it was the biggest struggle for me to finish this.
This book can be summed up by 'man with goatee tries to win back ex-wife'. And something about a perfume and evil sister which was just so like .. pointless?
There was like 0 world building. These characters could have legit been anyone - I didn't feel the connection to the Oberon/Titania story much at all, other than the fact that they have their names. There was like barely any character description, it all fell compeletely flat. The characters had no chemistry with each other, there was simply no feeling at all; no emotion that came through to me. This book made me feel absolutely nothing other than insanely bored and just annoyed looking at the page count, considering how many pages I still had left and when I would finally be done with this disaster. The dialogue was cringey and annoying and went nowhere. Oberon's mental monologue about how much he hates himself - like what for? And I felt myself putting the book down during the 'spice' as I was so bored of it at that point I wanted to legit do anything else than read.
Also I understand there is an increasing trend for the use of non-standard pronouns in literature, even though it's been done before I've noticed it more and more recently. I am not going to open the can of worms of whether I think this is a good idea or not personally, but what I will say is that, in my opinion, the use of non-standard pronouns within text should be at least explained, in the sense that I was expecting some 'feeling' then of what the character is like; some actual character description, which in this case we didn't get.
I think representation is cool and all and having a platform like a book to introduce these things to society is a noble goal, but as a reader I didn't really know anything about these characters other than the guy has a goatee, the girl is an actress and a cheat and the butler is using some different pronouns and genuinly, that doesn't make for a good read.
The plot, something about some perfume left me completely unimpressed; in fact - I remember there was some Sailor Moon episode about 20 years back where there was some evil monster sucking out people's souls via the application of perfume - I would have a rehash of that story in a book as a plot any day over this drivel. And then why did the sister hate the FMC that much? Something about someone killing her family? But in the grand scheme of things; as in where they are all immortal beings and have lived for who knows how many years - surely that's not the worst thing that happened to her? Not saying it's not bad (losing a loved one always is), but logically; living that long and having everyone die around you, I'm sure you would be realistically become somehow 'accustomed' to it, or at least found ways to deal with it that it wouldn't lead you to wanting to 'destroy the world'; as it's put in the book? Dunno, it's all very flimsy to me.
The only good thing about this book is that it was short and that now that I have finished I never have to pick it up again.