There was so much potential

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irezelina Avatar

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Thank you BookishFirst and author Ashley Hohenstein for providing an electronic version of the book Found for me to read and review. If you're a fan of fiction, fantasy, magical powers, action, and love triangles, this book is for you.

The main protagonist is a girl named Ophelia, and she has magical powers that allow her to feel & experience other people's emotions. She doesn't realize it's a good magical power until she meets Elias, who also has powers and later introduces her to the magical world she wasn't a part of. Elias and Ophelia are soul mates in the magical world BUT Ophelia also has feelings for her housemate Lucas. This is where the love triangle comes in and I'm not a huge fan of it. There's no real reason why Ophelia likes both men other than the fact that she physically reacts to Elias and finds Lucas attractive. We're also constantly reminded that the two men are fighting over her and she's also not making up her mind about who she wants to be with so she's stringing both of them along. I feel like she needs to be a strong independent woman and make a choice and stick with it.

The chapters alternate perspectives between Ophelia, Elias, and Lucas. I personally wanted more chapters from Elias' POV because he has more things going on other than pining for Ophelia. The beginning of the book starts with an amazing action scene with Elias, and you learn about his mission and how dangerous it was going to be, but the rest of the book just puts this plot on hold! This storyline just freezes and disappears for the rest of the book, and it's all about Ophelia being pampered and spoiled while she learns about her magical powers. As I was reading, I kept looking at the page numbers to see when we're going to get back into action, and I was disappointed that the majority of the book was just filler and small character moments for Ophelia.

I understand that this is a fantasy novel and nothing was supposed to be realistic, but I felt like the characters were very one-dimensional. Everyone was beautiful, everyone was glowing, everyone was skilled and had an epic story...why aren't there more diverse characters? And why is everyone so fixated and obsessed with Ophelia? Only near the end of the book do we find out that Ophelia is linked to some future catastrophic event, but why was it revealed so late in the book? We never understand why Ophelia needed to be protected and I think this was a huge miss for this story.

I think the magical world is really interesting, I appreciate the detailed floor plans at the end of the book that helped me visualize the setting better, and I like all the minor characters' background stories but there are more things that I found disappointing rather than satisfactory. I don't think the novel had enough action scenes, the plot barely moved forward at all, I feel like the book was so long and yet barely anything happened, I don't like how everyone was one-note and I don't like how Ophelia was coddled. This novel gave me Twilight Saga vibes where an ordinary girl catches the eye of an attractive magical male protagonist and her life changes forever but she gets protected and carried along by attractive people. I feel like there's so much potential for this magical world and I wish the book focused more on that.