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gggina13 's review for:
The Merciful Crow
by Margaret Owen
2.5 which sucks bc I loved Little Thieves!!! The more I move through authors' backlists the more I swear it is cursed for me
This one just didn't do it for me. The magic and caste systems were already kind of confusing from the get go - the caste systems are like named after birds and there's Crows, Hawks, like, I don't even remember, Orioles or some shit.. but Crows are the ones people hate even though they're called in to get rid of dead bodies, and they can get paid in teeth, and they use teeth to fuel their magic, like they burn up a tooth's magic power and harness the past of whoever's tooth it was and they can do random things like go invisible or track people with them... but for some reason they're like the caste of people that folks hate to acknowledge or touch or give any rights to, yeah idk
But they go to pick up these two dead bodies of royals and turns out they aren't actually dead and they needed to be smuggled out of the kingdom and taken to some allies, one is a prince and one is like the lookalike decoy who is supposed to volunteer to die in the prince's place if need be
The pacing was sooooo boring, it eventually ended up just being the main girl, Fie, and the two not-dead guys completing their journey across the map. It was the slowest paced and longest page count of them 3 just walking and having things happen to them. A romance developed, because of course it did, even though I don't know that enough really happened between the two of them to merit them falling for each other lol, then it became both Fie's family and her romance that had to be saved
The action picked up in the last 100 pages or so, and I liked the way it ended, but god it was such a slog to get to that point.
I did like the fact we had a bi love interest, I think the prince was asexual, and the book was sex positive and like anti-slut shaming, which is all stuff I can trust Margaret Owen to do. I'm just really confused about how it can be so similar in some ways to Little Thieves (messy main character, rivals to lovers, convoluted plot) but in other ways soooo deviated from what I liked so much about LT!!!
I may eventually read book 2, mostly because I have it and it's just a duology, but I don't think it'll be any time soon.
This one just didn't do it for me. The magic and caste systems were already kind of confusing from the get go - the caste systems are like named after birds and there's Crows, Hawks, like, I don't even remember, Orioles or some shit.. but Crows are the ones people hate even though they're called in to get rid of dead bodies, and they can get paid in teeth, and they use teeth to fuel their magic, like they burn up a tooth's magic power and harness the past of whoever's tooth it was and they can do random things like go invisible or track people with them... but for some reason they're like the caste of people that folks hate to acknowledge or touch or give any rights to, yeah idk
But they go to pick up these two dead bodies of royals and turns out they aren't actually dead and they needed to be smuggled out of the kingdom and taken to some allies, one is a prince and one is like the lookalike decoy who is supposed to volunteer to die in the prince's place if need be
The pacing was sooooo boring, it eventually ended up just being the main girl, Fie, and the two not-dead guys completing their journey across the map. It was the slowest paced and longest page count of them 3 just walking and having things happen to them. A romance developed, because of course it did, even though I don't know that enough really happened between the two of them to merit them falling for each other lol, then it became both Fie's family and her romance that had to be saved
The action picked up in the last 100 pages or so, and I liked the way it ended, but god it was such a slog to get to that point.
I did like the fact we had a bi love interest, I think the prince was asexual, and the book was sex positive and like anti-slut shaming, which is all stuff I can trust Margaret Owen to do. I'm just really confused about how it can be so similar in some ways to Little Thieves (messy main character, rivals to lovers, convoluted plot) but in other ways soooo deviated from what I liked so much about LT!!!
I may eventually read book 2, mostly because I have it and it's just a duology, but I don't think it'll be any time soon.