sagareads's reviews
169 reviews

Beautifully crafted, like all the Inkworld books, but I struggled to get very emotionally invested or engaged in reading until near the end.

Loved the first book, enjoyed the first 60% of this one, but the big reveal of what was actually driving the plot fell horrifically flat. Both the sequence of events that created the problem and the solution eventually implemented made very little sense -- on a practical level or an emotional one. Plus, partially due to how poorly crafted the plot ultimately was, nothing that happened in the last 40% of the book felt satisfying or meaningful. Honestly, I almost quit after the reveal, because I could see exactly how the rest of the book was going to unfold. And so it did. 

Other reviewers have mentioned the book's narrative issues, but I could have pushed through that pretty easily, given how short it is. What really got to me was the poor prose at the paragraph level: the overuse of the same subject-verb-object sentence structure, the droning repetition of passive "X was ..." descriptions when it would have been so easy to use a stronger verb. I'm not overattached to the "show, don't tell" axiom, but it definitely would have helped here -- the author would offer multiple sentences of flat sensory description, *then* tell me how Virika felt about what had been described, instead of weaving her reactions in more naturally. The dialog was also rather bad; it held up OK before the prison, largely because there weren't many long or detailed exchanges, but once Kalima started talking to Virika at length, the lack of rhythm and variation that marked the prose became even more grating -- it was hard to buy that Kalima so fervently believed in her cause when her dialog sounded so flat. 

Overall, the writing was just unpleasant enough to read that I didn't want to push through the second half of the book, even though it probably would have taken me less than half an hour.