Siri Pettersen

Does this book live up to the hype? No. I will go as far as to say that it has been overhyped and is not nearly as good as everyone says. It's like in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt when Mikey says Cate Blanchett is a great actress and Titus responds "is she? Or is she just tall?". Is this book good or is it just long? Spoiler: it's just long.

Honestly, I'm not saying all books that are this long are bad, but unless it's like idk Stephen King's IT or Lord of the Rings, there probably could have been some cuts and edits. So is the case here. At first I had gotten the idea that the author was very young and was like "I'll cut her some slack", but that wasn't really the case so now there's not really any excuses. Don't let a debut author write 600 pages unedited.

And it feels very unedited to me? The writing is rambly, constantly going over the same things again and again and again, and sometimes concepts are introduced at a part of the story where they should have been mentioned already. It feels like the author just kept writing thinking "I'll fix that in editing" and never did (though I'm sure the book was edited, it just doesn't feel that way).

Plus it just does a lot of things that bothers me in writing. Cursive thoughts that have already been explained in plain text. Waaaaaay more exclamation marks than are necessary. Witty dialogue that honestly just made me cringe. And it can't really decide on whether it should use a modern language or more archaic and settles for a mix that just doesn't work.

All these things made it very had for me to relate to the protagonists, who aren't very interesting people. Hirka is ????. She's like your typical YA protagonist in that she doesn't have much of a personality and just changes it whenever the scene needs her to. She's a bit egocentric and very convinced the world is out to get her, which is often true but not always. Her love interest, Rime, is like every Edward Cullen tragic-angsty-broody dude you've seen. And as in Twilight there's of course reasons they can never kiss or have sex that are ... kinda problematic. Because shaming girls, even for magical reasons, for having sex or wanting sex is kinda last century.

Plus I think the ball was dropped with the world-building. It takes way too long for tails to be mentioned given the premise of the book and they don't seem to play a particularly big part in Hirkas life? Which seems weird to me because I feel tails should be a big part of the body language of the world, but it's not. I never get the sense that Hirka is having trouble expressing herself for her lack of tail or that any of the other characters give themselves away by a tail twitch they didn't intend to do. It feels like a missed opportunity.

So why three stars? Idk, maybe because I liked the basis in norse mythology or because it was nice to be reading proper high fantasy again, where people hang at inns and throw beer at each other. It's not something I read that much these days and it made me nostalgic. And given the end of the book I am, annoyingly enough, interested in how it continues.… (meer)