Thank you to NetGalley and Xpresso Book Tours for providing a digital ARC for this book!

This book, while not a complete disappointment, left much to be desired from its original description.
Reminiscent of Stephanie Garber’s Caraval, These Wicked Stars offers a tale of a bastard girl, Hazel, stumbling upon a fantastical world of foreign markets and curiosities after striking up a deal with a stranger from her hometown. Wanting to break free from her abusive family, Hazel is thrust into the world of Bazaar and all is not what it seems on her journey to win back treasures for the love she lost back home.

Unlike Caraval, I don’t believe this book delivers in its world building of Bazaar nor its character development with Hazel. Between making multiple sworn oaths with strangers to chapters full of bleak backdrops with little action, These Wicked Stars did not grip me with its characters nor its plot.

The added element of old gods and repressed monster was something I did enjoy as well as the book’s side quests however, it does not completely redeem the book for me

This have much potential

3 stars
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