I read the first couple chapters of this through BookishFirst as a sneak peek, and based on those pages and the blurb, I thought this was going to be pretty cool. The author’s note makes it clear how personal this story is to her. Should be great, right?
Getting into the actual book, I have two main problems. First, there’s a lot of external action happening, which seemed fun at first, but it just keeps going. There’s no time to get a sense of who MJ is as a person, and what little we get is… really boring. She’s giving Mary Sue. She’s giving plot device. She has no consistent emotions, no coherent thoughts, she just moves through the plot and reacts to things that happen to her. It was hard to care about her because she was a blank slate, and remained so for as many of the chapters as I read.
So, no character development, just plot. Except, I have no idea what the plot was. MJ is attacked by fairies that claimed to be good but were really bad (maybe, although I feel like someone is lying about that part) so she gets whisked away to a magical world that isn’t described very clearly. She’s supposed to be worried about her murdered dad, but instead she gets shuttled along to a magical faery finishing school and is trying to make sense of the architectural plan, and now we’re 20% of the way through the book and I neither understand nor care what is happening, because there’s nothing to hold onto or be invested in.
This was a DNF for me. Other people may not feel the same way, because I have similar complaints about a lot of very popular books (cough cough ACOTAR and 4th Wing). I don’t want to leave a star rating, and would have quietly DNFed without comment if I hadn’t received an ARC from the publisher for review purposes.
Getting into the actual book, I have two main problems. First, there’s a lot of external action happening, which seemed fun at first, but it just keeps going. There’s no time to get a sense of who MJ is as a person, and what little we get is… really boring. She’s giving Mary Sue. She’s giving plot device. She has no consistent emotions, no coherent thoughts, she just moves through the plot and reacts to things that happen to her. It was hard to care about her because she was a blank slate, and remained so for as many of the chapters as I read.
So, no character development, just plot. Except, I have no idea what the plot was. MJ is attacked by fairies that claimed to be good but were really bad (maybe, although I feel like someone is lying about that part) so she gets whisked away to a magical world that isn’t described very clearly. She’s supposed to be worried about her murdered dad, but instead she gets shuttled along to a magical faery finishing school and is trying to make sense of the architectural plan, and now we’re 20% of the way through the book and I neither understand nor care what is happening, because there’s nothing to hold onto or be invested in.
This was a DNF for me. Other people may not feel the same way, because I have similar complaints about a lot of very popular books (cough cough ACOTAR and 4th Wing). I don’t want to leave a star rating, and would have quietly DNFed without comment if I hadn’t received an ARC from the publisher for review purposes.