2¾ STARS

I feel conflicted and bummed out about this book tbh.

It has lots of ingredients that could make this a fantastic book for me, but somehow all those ingredients just don't 'connect with/didn't work for' me the way I was hoping it would. It truly pains me to say this, because I absolutely Adored the other work I've read by this author (the Ruined trilogy) before and was so looking forward to fall in love with this new story written by her that looked so promising from the get go.

That being said, there were some good things present as well; I loved the action scenes for one, the characters were fun to read about - although I felt like some issues they encountered/had to process were a bit too juvenile for me in the way it was written into the forming and developing relationships - and the writing by the author was just super fluent and engaging. So despite me having quite some remarks on the execution of this book on some parts, I also enjoyed myself from time to time as well. So yes: all those feelings has me feeling very conflicted.

Overall this was a mostly enjoyable story, but unfortunately this wasn't as epic as I hoped it'd be beforehand regarding the execution. There were quite some developments I saw coming from miles away and I felt like some elements just didn't 'click' together in this setting, but because of the authors writing style and me liking some of the characters a lot, I'll probably be reading the next book as well to see how it'll end haha.