2 stars

I received a copy of this book through Goodreads’ First Reads in exchange for an honest review.

I really hate leaving bad reviews, but this book and I just did not get along. I respect the author’s ability to use world-building to survive in a mentally abusive marriage and am thankful that she was able to get out of that marriage, but as far as literature goes, I don’t think this book is very good.

For starters, it is poorly written. There are multiple grammatical and spelling errors repeated throughout the book (like using ‘waived’ when the context calls for ‘waved’) that make it very difficult to read. Also, idioms were used incorrectly such as ‘once and a while’ instead of ‘once in a while’, which hinder the fluidity of reading. Overall, the sentence structure was poorly done so that many sentences became awkward run-ons that were unclear to the reader. I had to re-read many sentences and in some cases was still unsure what the author was trying to get across. Other sentences were just repetitive such as “I want you to finish school, because that is what I want.” This book needs a great deal of editing to help with its overall clarity.

As far as the story goes, it was…interesting. Full disclosure, I have not read any of the other books in the series and I think that really affected my understanding of the plot. This is a difficult series to jump into partway through and I would not recommend doing so.

From what I gathered from the plot, the main character comes off as bouncing between completely self-centered and horribly melodramatic about all the sacrifices she makes. This novel runs in a similar vein with Twilight in that it features a girl everyone falls in love with and no one is really sure why. This does go a step further in that not only does every guy she meets fall helplessly in love with her, but in many cases she reciprocated their feelings and had to mate bond with them all. I’m totally fine with ployandry, but from what I can tell, all of her mates are at least jealous and at most blatantly hostile toward each other.

The plot jumps around a lot and there are many stories that branch off the main plot, some of which are never resolved in the book. The text is at times disgustingly and unnecessarily gory. There were too many characters to really keep track off (and since I have not read the other books I had no idea who they were). Also, all the races get confusing because they are mentioned by name and some minor physical features, but are never really described in depth (again, a problem that may be alleviated by reading the previous books).

For the most part, I did not enjoy this book. I think the story has potential, but the poor writing really disengaged me. It reads like a first draft of a novel that still needs quite a bit of polishing.