by Erin Summerill
rating:☆
published: 27th December 2016
spoilers? not really
Goodreads
Galley provided by publisher
The main thing this book suffers from is that, quite honestly, it's all been done before. Everything about this book reminded me of other YA fantasies I'd read, and to top it all off, it was full of clichés.
I'm going to start with the main character, Britta, who, as YA fantasy MCs are wont, is pale and does not believe herself to be beautiful. So far, so yawn. She is also an Amazing tracker. But not really, because she seems to miss a helluva lot of trails throughout the book. Add onto that, she is so incredibly naïve. I mean, there's naivety, but then there's Naivety, which is what we see from Britta. She is also very, very bland. But, get this!, she has this amazing ability to be able to tell when people are lying. (She feels the warmth of truth. Spare me.) She's different from other girls. (OK, OK, I'm getting sarky now. I'll chill.) (She's also so bloody helpless! And then she goes and complains when people do what they do to protect her!)
Not to mention she seemed some kind of cross between a Sarah J Maas character, and Mare from Red Queen. And not in a good way.
She also has this ability to sense when Cohen is around. You could just hear my eyes roll into the back of my head at this point.
The book also had the slightly irritating habit of throwing in bits of information that it hadn't previously mentioned, like when Molly the innkeeper's wife showed up out of nowhere. To be fair though, that could easily have been me. I was skim reading a little at the time.
Moving on to Cohen and Britta. With this relationship, the author seems to be throwing all the possible tropes in. To list a few: her not believing he could ever like her, she does something stupid and he gets irrationally pissed off, she puts on a dress and he goes all goggle-eyed at her, her thinking that putting on a dress will make her immediately unrecognisable to the guards chasing her, and of course, the obligatory I shouldn't have kissed you. It's been a while since I read a book with these tropes, and I forgot how much they annoyed me.
There were also a few scenes which irritated me. One goes thus:
"I didn't mean to hurt you. Are you all right?" "I wasn't being serious. Don't start treating me like a weak girl now.
Because apparently that's the route we're going to go down. The one where someone asking if you're alright means they're treating you as a "weak girl". Thanks.
The second scene has Britta asking if two Channelers (basically sorceresses) could marry and have a stronger offspring. To which Enat laughs and says marry? no of course not, because Channelers are all women. And Britta laughs too, because apparently there are no lesbians in this world, ha ha ha.
I also wasn't a fan of the writing. It felt kind of forced at points, and somewhat overdramatic (there was a big reveal late on, and I just laughed, because the writing was so over the top).
So yeah. Suffice to say, I didn't enjoy this one.
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