First things first: I have used my human detectors to detect that this was written by a human.

None of my thoughts are in any way denying HM Wolfe every bit of success that comes her way — I’m genuinely thrilled for her and don’t know why The Atlantic decided to publish a bizarre smear campaign against her.

But. Ugh. This just wasn’t good.

Let’s start with some positives:

— I liked Jameson — Callum and Lira had some genuinely romantic moments — I really enjoyed the whole sequence with the failed rescue in the club

And now, the negatives:

— Shadera. Who? Because she felt missing for a lot of her own story. The girl was not present. She had no personality. I found her incredibly hard to root for, because she just did nothing, beyond the odd snarky comment. Snark doth not a personality make! Mainly we just had to witness this poor woman get beaten, assaulted, injured, over and over again. I know the book is sold as dark dystopia and that’s fine, but I never felt like any of this violence towards her led us anywhere. She didn’t have an arc. It was gratuitous. — the timeline. Supposedly, Shadera and Greyson go from hating each other to being in love within a week. Keeping in mind that Shadera is in a fairly nice monogamous relationship with Jameson at the start, this felt absolutely insane to me. I felt like they had no time for build up towards the feelings they were expressing by the end. If this is a slow burn, then even if they’d ended with a grudging “I’d rather you not die” by the end I would have preferred it. — the world. We suddenly hear a one liner about “the city state to the north” as an explanation of Maximus’s plans. Where? What’s its name? Where is it? Why is it in collapse? How are they going to sustain all these elites with none of the plebs? If they have those resources, why are the plebs there in the first place? He didn’t seem stressed about workers for farms and factories so… what’s the reason for the subjugation of the rings in the first place? This is the issue with all these dystopias that follow The Hunger Games. But The Hunger Games makes it clear that the Capitol needs the resources from the Districts, and we understand the previous rebellion etc. In Daggermouth, Wolfe has skipped over the worldbuilding. We have all the aesthetics of a dystopia and none of its meaning. Listen, I know that we all want that 2012 dystopia back, I know. But half those stories didn’t work for the same reasons. If the world doesn’t make sense, neither does anything else that follows. — in a similar vein: Maximus. Maximums is hated and despised by:

• his son
• his daughter
• the entertainment leader of his district
• his own captain of the guard
• his wife
• at least two thirds of his population. If someone is hated THAT MUCH, especially by the people in his inner circle, then how on earth is he holding onto power? Yes it’s clear some of the Veyra have ulterior motives for following him. But in general, it was never made clear to me why. If his personal paranoia is growing unmanageable, why was he left to his devices for so long? As a villain he was cartoonishly evil, and I have no idea how he’d lasted this long.

Overall, it was… readable. I will admit the 540 pages flew in. But it was ludicrously overhyped and I will not be continuing to book 2 😃