i'm sorry but this was not good. the only reason i managed to finish it was because i'm reading it for book club or else i would have DNF'ed this well before finishing it. the trials in the story were stupid and unecessary and served no purpose really. all the characters ever did was growl, hiss and snarl. every other chapter started with elessia waking up or going to sleep or what the weather was doing outside or whether she was eating food or what time of day it was. it was such a snoozefest !!!!!

if a book is bad but i like the characters then i can manage and usually that will increase my rating but. there was no connection to any of the characters whatsoever. i've read fanfiction that's 100 times better than this book. i feel so bad rating it so low with a horrible review omg but i have to be honest!!!! the writing is very amateur. the characters dialogue felt forced and stilted. it was unnatural. i could not get immersed in this story at all. there was very vague descriptions and the characters were wholly inconsistent.

i think this book would have had a lot more potential had it been edited a lot more. there are so many revisions that need working on. sentence structures are all over the place, longwinded vague descriptions that make no sense. sometimes it's taken me a few times to reread passages because i'm trying to understand wtf is being said or implied. the sad thing is that this had so much potential!!! it needs a lot of work and honestly i'm really surprised it got published in the state it is - i am really sorry, i feel awful saying this but it's true.

also another gripe was that every character seemed to immediately know what elessia was thinking WITHOUT EVEN UTTERING THE WORDS. and it's not one of those "you can tell by the look on your face" it's completely convoluted and by characters who don't even know her so well at the time. like ok a friend, maybe i can understand. but it's happened with so many different characters on so many different occasions that it was hard to ignore. maybe if i was 14 and reading wattpad stories then maybe i would've liked this more but it was a disaster.

too much time was spent on the characters' facial expressions or what direction their heads turned or "dipped". and what is it about eye collisions?????? hello???? someone call an ophthamologist because this shit isn't normal????????????

the real trial of this book was me reading through it because that felt like the most torturous of all. i deserve a medal for this.

needless to say, i will definitely not be continuing this series. godspeed to those who do though <3 you're made of stronger stuff than me.

need i go on?