2.75 🌟

The premise had a lot of potential, a publicity romance stunt becoming more truth than fiction but unfortunately the chemistry failed. A good 200 pages could have been edited out making this story more contained because despite the length of the novel, the characters lacked depth.  A few moments of laughter but sparks did not fly. 

I felt the need to acquire some efficient weaponry.

I'm not her — I carry around the imprint of that child. Her hurts and truths are my foundations, but I am not her. I was the castle built upon that hill, and now the ruin. I am haunted by the ghost of myself. By the ghosts of myself. By the little girl, the young woman, the mother, wife, by the widow fresh in the grief. Even yesterday watches with a stranger's caution as it stands at my shoulder.

Someone needs to tell Mark Lawrence that there is no quota on the oxford comma. That he can, and should use it more. The prose, beautiful as it is, sure needed more.

I also appreciate what he tried to do with the narrative structure; unfortunately, while I preferred the Academy pov, I still feel like we didn't have enough to properly get attached to the characters. Both in terms of time (because of the pov change, but also, we quite literally only cover a few moments sprinkled over 6 years) and in terms of emotional closeness. All of the characters are quite emotionally shut off and by the time we finally get some crumbs of depths towards the end, it's too little too late imo. Too many things happened that would have had me sobbing, had I been attached to the characters as I should have).

And the Rue pov, which I started off quite interested by (and loved all the commentary on ageing), felt very much aimless. I need to know where we going, have some sort of end goal, to care about, well, going there. Even as we reached the last page, setting up where the sequel will lead, I just didn't care about that plot.

What I do care about (but enough to read the sequel? Don't know) is Rue's life before all of that, the triplets, the different trios that were explored (very shallowly unfortunately) throughout.. But the big, political (?), overall plot? Don't care.