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chaiteatea 's review for:
Of Blood and Aether
by Harper Hawthorne
1.5 stars. DNF'd at 30%/C20 Tandem read with audio and I liked the narrators until they spoke in the other MCs voice which sucked. Neither had the accent to pull off the other. It is dual and every other chapter flips POVs between the MCs.
I'll will start with what I liked, the magic system and history/lore of the world was really interesting HOWEVER I did feel like I was missing a complete primer I was supposed to read before this book. This is a debut so there is no other book to read before this so that means the author feel into the trap of forgetting that the reader does indeed need to know what the author has scribbled out in some word doc or on a whiteboard since she would be her own scholar and historian and thus doesn't need to think about it, she just knows, but this is our first introduction. It wasn't bad, again I was very interested by it, but it definitely felt lacking. Sadly, this is probably the only thing about the book that I liked. Actually I lied, I also liked the prologue, it was very intriguing and probably the most well written part of the book.
Onto the rest, LESS IS MORE. My gods more than half the chapters were unnecessary and boring. Nothing of note happened nearly the entire time. It is a very character driven book but you still need to have a solid concrete drive for the characters to be where they are and do what they are doing. Like "I wanna go to the magic university to figure out my magic" is too vague for the FMC. We need to see growth towards her goals (even if its incremental) and it needs to be something tangible not abstract. Other than the MMC being the captain of spycraft or whatever and needing to find some missing children, we have no idea why he ended up in the city, how he became a captain, and most importantly, how he got from the events of the prologue (as a prince) to now. Also didn't care for every chapter of his to be filled with comments about how hes such a degenerate and no one can handle his vices which I am sure is just trying to set up the BDSM mentioned in the CW pages but we aren't dumb. We got the hint the first time it was mentioned.
Let me turn your attention to the romance, it was instalust and their interactions were cringe half the time. There would be constant remarks about how smart each other were, when none of the conversations were intellectually stimulating in any capacity, and the kicker was the MMC would remark how the FMC had such a "wicked mouth". Dear reader, she said the word 'fuck' a handful of times. That is what kicked that all off. She never graduated to saying anything "wicked" befitting a sailor let alone anything past a tween discovering an unrestricted FPS game lobby for the first time.
Anyways I am disappointed, the synopsis and prologue had me reeled it but then it lost me in the vast nothingness.
I'll will start with what I liked, the magic system and history/lore of the world was really interesting HOWEVER I did feel like I was missing a complete primer I was supposed to read before this book. This is a debut so there is no other book to read before this so that means the author feel into the trap of forgetting that the reader does indeed need to know what the author has scribbled out in some word doc or on a whiteboard since she would be her own scholar and historian and thus doesn't need to think about it, she just knows, but this is our first introduction. It wasn't bad, again I was very interested by it, but it definitely felt lacking. Sadly, this is probably the only thing about the book that I liked. Actually I lied, I also liked the prologue, it was very intriguing and probably the most well written part of the book.
Onto the rest, LESS IS MORE. My gods more than half the chapters were unnecessary and boring. Nothing of note happened nearly the entire time. It is a very character driven book but you still need to have a solid concrete drive for the characters to be where they are and do what they are doing. Like "I wanna go to the magic university to figure out my magic" is too vague for the FMC. We need to see growth towards her goals (even if its incremental) and it needs to be something tangible not abstract. Other than the MMC being the captain of spycraft or whatever and needing to find some missing children, we have no idea why he ended up in the city, how he became a captain, and most importantly, how he got from the events of the prologue (as a prince) to now. Also didn't care for every chapter of his to be filled with comments about how hes such a degenerate and no one can handle his vices which I am sure is just trying to set up the BDSM mentioned in the CW pages but we aren't dumb. We got the hint the first time it was mentioned.
Let me turn your attention to the romance, it was instalust and their interactions were cringe half the time. There would be constant remarks about how smart each other were, when none of the conversations were intellectually stimulating in any capacity, and the kicker was the MMC would remark how the FMC had such a "wicked mouth". Dear reader, she said the word 'fuck' a handful of times. That is what kicked that all off. She never graduated to saying anything "wicked" befitting a sailor let alone anything past a tween discovering an unrestricted FPS game lobby for the first time.
Anyways I am disappointed, the synopsis and prologue had me reeled it but then it lost me in the vast nothingness.