Started: 16/04/21
DNF: 12/05/21
Spoiles: No
DNF at 280 pages.
This is so unfortunate, but it’s time to admit defeat. Not just with this novel, but the genre in general. It’s a sad truth, but I think at 29 years old, I’ve finally aged out of YA.
I just don’t enjoy it any more. I can’t connect, can’t relate, and because of this, I can’t bring myself to care either. The last time I loved a YA book was 9 months ago. I’m not connecting with the books I’m reading and so, slowly, losing my love of reading.
I realised it was time to break up with YA after starting an adult fantasy grimdark novel and loving it! I’m now binging the whole series and have rediscovered why I love reading so much.
I’m not entirely giving up on YA. If something truly fantastic catches my eye, I’ll happily give it a go. However, YA has burned me too many times. Setting my expectations so high only to be incredibly average. It’s a saturated genre, we all know it. The ‘fast fashion’ of the publishing industry, for lack of a better way to describe it. So even though this isn’t totally goodbye to YA for me, it’s definitely a goodbye…for now.
Anyway, enough of my TED Talk, this is still a review of sorts, so I’ll try to briefly explain what my issues were with this book.
I’m not in a position to accurately rate this book because I believe I’m no longer the intended audience. Maybe readers younger than me will enjoy this a lot, or maybe readers of all ages will share my thoughts.
My take: This book is way too big for a YA book. (Bigger, in fact, than that amazing grimdark series I mentioned.) And the thing is, it shows. I found this book really slow. It seems to take hundreds of pages for anything of significance to happen.
There are two POV characters, and they don’t actually see each other for the first time until over halfway through. Too long. By this point, I’ve lost interest. Even though things that resemble plot do happen in this first half of the books, none of it feels like the meat of the story. It’s just build up as we wait for the actual plot to begin. Which, by the way, I still don’t actually know what the actual plot is. Nahri reached the city, but thinking about it now, I don’t even know why she’s trying to get to this city.
I think that’s the problem, and one of the reasons why I struggled to invest. I don’t know what the stakes are. A book needs stakes. And they need to be established early on. The stakes also need to tie into the MC’s internal conflicts. This is what makes us invest in a character as well as a story. Bad thing will happen, and it matters to MC because... But I picked up on none of this in the first half of the book. I couldn’t connect because it felt like there was nothing for me to connect to. I was just sort of drifting through this novel. Floating further and further away from understanding and enjoyment.
Perhaps other readers will enjoy this one more, but it did absolutely nothing for me except serve as a good comparison and a perfect moment of clarity as I read a truly fantastic book alongside this.
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