Stars: 3
Author: Alwyn Hamilton
Genre: YA Fantasy
Publisher:
Review:
The first chapter was gangbusters. We start off with a shooting contest and a good swirl of intrigue and some very neat wild, wild west, meets Arabian nights world building. Sadly, I found the second chapter, and the rest of the book, to be very inconsistent. There was enough action to keep me interested, but much of the plot as though we were jumping through space and time and did not flow smoothly. The world building was actually my biggest problem and then the dialogue. There is A LOT of world building here, so much so that I struggled to keep track of it. The world didn't seamlessly build around the characters, instead it felt dropped into the narrative in large chunks. It often felt like info dumps that were literal asides from the narrative. Strangely, the whole set up was really interesting and I still wanted to know. The first few pages had really hooked me with the main character of Amani. There is also a romance, but I wasn't too keen on that either.
We meet, Jin, mysterious boy and romantic interest on the first few pages. He is mysterious, as almost all young adult fantasy heroes are, but it is very, very clear that there is going to be romance. Amani immediately begins noticing his muscles when his shirt is off. We proceed from there quite quickly to them kissing-- as a distract as they are running from people who want to catch them. After that, it seems to fall flat. There is little, if any romantic tension for the rest of the book.
The big reveal I also did not find very revealing. It is pretty standard fare for this type of book. So I wasn't surprised at how the ending played out.
Reading this back it looks as if I completely hated this book, which oddly enough, I didn't. I actually read quite quickly and wanted to get to the end, which is unusual for books that I dislike. There is something here. I might be willing to dive into the second book in hopes that the writing improves and now that all the world-building is out of the way, we can dig into the meat of the story.
