Review - "The Walled City"

The Walled City
by Ryan Graudin
rating:☆☆☆☆
published: 4th November 2014
spoilers? no

Goodreads

There are moments you wait for. And then there are moments you wait for. Moments you spend every other moment preparing for. Points of your life that click and turn. Push you in a completely new direction.

Before I review this, I just want to note there are a helluva lot of TWs in this book: child/domestic abuse, rape, drugs, forcing drugs on someone, sex slavery (involving an older man who wants to own one of the characters), and mentions of torture. It's dark, to say the least.

If I had to choose between this book and Wolf by Wolf, I think I would go with Wolf by Wolf simply because I loved the characters in that quicker than I did the ones in this. Don't get me wrong, I do love Dai and Jin Ling and Mei Yee, but I think because the book was split between their POVs, it took me longer to like them. Especially Mei Yee, who I was kind of bored by early on I gotta admit (until she decided that she needed to take action and help Dai) because she seemed to just sort of accept her lot in life and not want to do much to change it (I can understand why, given what happened to Sing, but equally it made her a little boring in the beginning). By the end, though, I loved her (although not so much her and Dai together. I don't know why, maybe because it seemed a bit of a cliche, like it's a boy rescues girl from captivity, they fall in love kind of thing).

On top of preferring the characters in Wolf by Wolf, I felt like in this, the plot didn't really kick in until about halfway through. Sure, it was there, but it was all shrouded in mystery, because Dai was keeping secrets and Jin Ling was keeping secrets and Mei Yee wasn't really able to do much. Around the halfway stage, when all the secrets came out, was when it started to get interesting (not that it wasn't before, when it was interesting in a setting-the-scene way, but interesting as in now shit is starting to go down). When it did kick in, though, it kicked in fast and everything went wrong very very quickly (and I had to go to bed with 90 pages to go and no idea of how everything would turn out. 0/10 do not recommend).

I don't think I have much more to say about this book, other than that the relationships between the characters also killed me (Dai was like a big brother to Jin Ling and I maybe teared up a little at that). Same old, same old, basically.