The cover is beautiful and the premise sounded amazing, so of course this didn’t live up to either. Wait for it . . . I should have written this review back when I finished the book in July because I no longer remember specifics on my feelings. All that I’m left with are feelings of negative discontentment, but maybe that’s really all you need to know about my experience with this book. If I’d have liked it more, I would remember more.
I suppose the main takeaway here is that I found this book incredibly dull and I did not ever want to be reading it. There were so many words and pages in this book and I feel like most of them were wasted. I don’t remember anything about the characters. I do remember being perplexed at a lot of the things the characters were doing. And also why when the author had such a great premise, why nothing was happening. Nothing made sense to me.
I feel like this is a case where the bones of a good fantasy world are here, but no good characters populate it, and nothing happens in the story. She could have cut out two hundred and fifty pages easily and the book would have been so much better. I even tried switching to the audiobook, and that didn’t help, even though I found the voices of both narrators to be mellifluous and nice to listen to.
My advice is that unless you are really into mediocre YA fantasy, you skip this one. Despite its Jamaican culture inspired world, there really was nothing all that special about it.
[2.5 stars]