Jen L. Grey

dnf at 95%.
This one started out decent but unoriginal but never makes it beyond mediocre. It walked the beaten path and seemed solid initially.
But it falls apart the further we get in the story. The premise seemed reasonable at first but it turns out to be just forced drama.
Then the book takes a 180° turn into perfect people fighting the bad guys' territory.
The final straw was the terrible climax fighting scene which elevated the already rather stilted dialogue to completely new heights.
It's full of completely unbelievable and again stilted dialogue and behavior. It reads like what you might expect in an early middle-grade fantasy medieval battle but with people actually dying graphically. It's just really strange.

I am not doing all the nuances of this story justice with this review but I stand by the overall rating. I am just not willing to peel apart the many different problems this book has.
There is no spark of creativity or novelty here to justify that kind of time investment.
It's a pure genre book.… (more)