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A review by brii_brii
On These Black Sands by Vanessa Rasanen
3.0
I really wanted to love this more. It's been on my tbr for a while, and I was really looking forward to it, but it just didn't hit the right spots for me.
I didn't love any of our characters. Aoife rubbed me the wrong way almost the entire book. She's clueless. Constantly endangering people around her because she can't listen and comes off very entitled and whiny.
Declan comes off super soft. And I couldn't imagine him as the pirate captain I was supposed to. I think it really hindered my experience with this book because I never took any of it very seriously.
The addition of Cait’s character helped a lot.
Her parts were full of spies and subterfuge, and all of the things that I wanted from a pirate novel, but they were so short, I definitely didn't get enough.
The rest of the time, I felt saddled with two extremely immature kids who were playing at being pirates. The romance between Aoife and Declan felt very forced to me, with very little chemistry. Other than one conversation with each one just bombarding the other, they hardly even really talked. And that one conversation felt like a 20 questions game and the author forcing the characters together. It just didn't feel believable.
I will say (after all of those cons) that I loved the idea behind the Council and the Fae. The plot that this story follows is really great, and while I might not have loved the characters throughout, I absolutely loved the story.
I didn't love any of our characters. Aoife rubbed me the wrong way almost the entire book. She's clueless. Constantly endangering people around her because she can't listen and comes off very entitled and whiny.
Declan comes off super soft. And I couldn't imagine him as the pirate captain I was supposed to. I think it really hindered my experience with this book because I never took any of it very seriously.
The addition of Cait’s character helped a lot.
Her parts were full of spies and subterfuge, and all of the things that I wanted from a pirate novel, but they were so short, I definitely didn't get enough.
The rest of the time, I felt saddled with two extremely immature kids who were playing at being pirates. The romance between Aoife and Declan felt very forced to me, with very little chemistry. Other than one conversation with each one just bombarding the other, they hardly even really talked. And that one conversation felt like a 20 questions game and the author forcing the characters together. It just didn't feel believable.
I will say (after all of those cons) that I loved the idea behind the Council and the Fae. The plot that this story follows is really great, and while I might not have loved the characters throughout, I absolutely loved the story.