My Quick Takes:
- 2.75/5 stars ⭐️⭐️✨
- Genre 📚 scifi
- Language 🤐 excessive strong
- Spice ❤️🔥 closed door
- Content 🤔 on page death, violence, torture, same sex relationships, themes of prostitution
Before you say anything, I know, it gets better.
My two biggest qualms with this book were one, the unlikeable main character. He proves over and over again that he actually hasn’t had any kind of character development, even after his repeated idiocy continually puts him between a rock and a hard place.
Second, the strong language felt gratuitous. I realize the author was using it to distinguish between classes, but at the end of the day it’s lazy writing. There are so many different ways you can use other markers, or realm appropriate language to distinguish classes, characters, caste systems, etc. It continually took me out of the plot and world building. Additionally, it was extremely jarring, the first 5 chapters have maybe one or two uses of mild language, and then ch 6-40ish have abhorrent uses of foul language, only for the final half of the book to not have hardly any again. Makes it make even less sense.
The only thing it has going for it was the final 10 chapters when the plot finally starts to take shape. I also really enjoyed the small glimpses and tiny morsels of world building he gives the reader. He’s obviously a talented author, I just don’t know if two rough books to get to the heart of the series in books 3 and 4 (which is when I keep hearing from everyone that it gets better) is worth it to me.
If I hadn’t buddy read this book I probably would’ve DNF’d somewhere around the 35-40% mark where there’s a long stretch of slow moving plot. The friend I was buddy reading with had similar thoughts and issues with the book/plot, neither of us is sure if the second book is worth the time to get to book 3.
To hear even more thoughts on navigating this book from a Biblical worldview, watch my youtube review:
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