What in the abbot elementary There are some interesting ideas here and a well thought out magic system but god it gets SO bogged down by trivial administrative minutia. I stopped, looked it up, and indeed, the author is a teacher. There’s only so much lesson plan org chart class observing appointment schedule homework marking that a book billing itself as dark academia can interject without coming off as /regular/ academia. Here’s an extract from where our main character observes a classroom: Walden opened up the observation form on her laptop and made a note: good behavior even before their teacher arrived. A nice set, as Ezekiel had said. Lesson observations could be very dull. What was wanted at the end was a beautiful A4 page of admiring notes that Walden and Ezekiel could both put in their prof dev folders ahead of the next pay review cycle. After all, there were very few surprises involved in good teaching. Different people had different styles, but the fundamentals were consistent across age groups, across disciplines, across all different kinds of schools: know your students, and Know your subject. All you could really get from an observation was a handful of ideas for things to incorporate into your own practice: activities, structures, turns of phrase… This goes on forever, intercutting the meat of the scene (of which there is…little) with didactic, vaguely relevant information. Most of the time, it adds nothing to the worldbuilding, character or plot. Just before this, there’s a tangent about how Covid affected students. Will this be relevant later? Probably not. The author just had to say her piece about it—which would be fine if it didn’t detract so jarringly from the greater story. Anytime the book even threatens to get atmospheric and creepy and beautiful, Tesh rams in six Fun Teaching Factoids to bring it crashing back to the dour reality of an elementary break room.

-this is still not good but im too far in to Dnf -i will not comment on the smut because i simply do not care. Our romantic leads have them chemistry of wet paper towels. How long have they even known each other? 2 weeks? Ok pledge ur eternal devotion I guess -there are exactly 6 hamlets (hamlets, not even villages) in this kingdom. It is minuscule. How the FUCK does each hamlet have a different biome. This is basically a video game map, with boss battles at each hamlet. -the comic relief character turning to us and spouting a paragraph of live laugh love wisdom out of blue? What. Did gillig write this with a shroud on.

-messy messy -is this entire country just three streets wide. so much of plot is people conveniently bumping into each other. -every hamlet is dedicated to ONE profession? this economy is in shambles. -Something about that recent Battle Scene was kind of giving boss fight. The Boss having one (1) signature move (Throw Ink Attack)? ok lol. Also you're telling me he was just there in a ivy-shrouded building. Waiting for someone to challenge him. Girl. That's a pokemon. -HORSES ARE NOT CARS BTW? You don't just park it in an alley after travelling all night (with two people riding the whole time no less!). -Our girlboss main character has eaten basically nothing but is somehow not just coherent but actively attacking grown men, saving darling children from ne'er do wells, and lowkey ignoring the entire upheaval of her belief system.

I...don't like this lol. Both main characters are acting in a way I can only describe as fourth-wing-esque (weirdly unreasonable? cliched, rather immature dialogue with the goal of manufacturing tension instead of revealing character). There's a jarring dissonance between the atmosphere and the character dialogue/action, and some of the descriptive scenes are so...clunky, for lack of a better word. Chapter 6, for example, opens like this: Coulson Faire was brilliant. A span of merchant tents in a vast field. On the far side of the field was the great castle that could be none other than Castle Luricht. The king’s castle. okay girl...give us nothing. I think reading this at the same time as Bujold's Chalion series + Kinsale's For My Lady's Heart ( all of a similar-ish historical bent, castles, kings, knights, chivalry, etc) is making me uncharitable. You can see (if you squint) that Gillig did some research, but it feels very silly and surface-level compared to Kinsale, whose work is almost incomprehensibly alien in its use of Middle English, and Bujold, who is so meticulous in her craft that you can tell, from the dialogue alone, whether a handmaiden is speaking or her lady. In Gillig's world, kings, knights and clerics use the same vocabulary and grammatical structure as peasants and farmers. Swapping 'bitches' with 'shrews' (and 'asshole' for 'knave') does not Ye Olde English make. It does, however, make me want 2 vomit.