The magical quest nature of the story had me very intrigued and in the beginning I felt like it was going to be a winner but the plot tailed off around the half way point and I began to struggle with it, there wasn't enough depth and I didn't care too much for the characters. As shame really, I was looking forward to it as the synopsis sounded great.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC!
Look at the cover! and the blurbs too! Unfortunately, this book is just not for me. Maybe the others liked it just fine but for me, I can only give it a 3 stars

i enjoyed reading this, I loved the use of magic and the quest in this book. The characters were great and I enjoyed getting to know them. I enjoyed the way the author wrote.

Oh, this cover was everything! But sadly, it is where the amazingness of this book ends. I liked the first part of it, but I found that I was struggling more and more the further I went. It was confusing, underdeveloped, surface-level and it fell flat. I expected more.

thanks to netgalley and the publisher for providing me with the digital arc in exchange for an honest review.

rating: 2.5 stars

i was ready to love this book from how the synopsis was intriguing, but unfortunately, the story just did not live up to its true potential. it lacked in a lot of areas and felt rather bland or surface-level where i needed it to go deeper and have thicker coats. i struggled to even finish this, but it was enjoyable to a certain extent.

I really wanted to love this book. The cover is gorgeous, the description is intriguing, but unfortunately, the story just did not live up to the possibilities. I ended up quitting this book about 65% of the way in, but I was struggling almost from the beginning.

The premise of the book is exciting: a magical island where a brutal group of Cutthroats have overthrown the old ways and forced themselves into power. A group of rebels led by the farm clans challenges them and the story builds from there except, it didn't. The book begins with an ambush by the rebels on a caravan of Cutthroats who are bringing the local taxes back to the castle. People die, there seems to be some usage of unexplained magic, the rebel leader is saddened, then the scene cuts immediately to the farm where more of the rebels are living.

We are introduced, rapid fire to several different characters who are barely explained and many of whom get their own, unlabeled narratives in the story. I could not keep up with who was speaking or to whom. I wasn't sure of who the main protagonist was until almost 40% into the story. Eventually, we also meet the Guardian and his dog, Strawberry--who is given her own extensive narrative perspective. Who are the Cutthroats, where did they come from, why do they want this island? Those are all excellent questions, that I never had answered even preliminarily.

As of my stopping point, the history of the island had yet to be explained. At one point, we do see murals in the castle that illustrate the Cutthroats overthrowing the goblin people and other magical peoples of the island, but there is no explanation of that or of the historical magic of the island. The Guardian tells part of the history of other parts of the world that even the other characters have never heard of even though we don't have a baseline for the actual setting of the story.

I struggled to place this world in time or culture. They travel in carriages, on horseback, they fight with bows and arrows, swords, potentially magic, but they also have conversations like this, "'Hey, Aiko, can we talk for a second?' . . . 'Uh, sure, I guess.' . . . 'Hey, this isn't a vacation!'" The dialogue frequently felt incongruous with the rest of the story. While I'm not fully a stickler for that, because everything else was so confusing, this wound up being the final straw.

Ultimately, this book read like it came in the middle of a series rather than begins one. It felt like I was meant to understand the magical system, the history, to know the characters with little or nonexistent introduction or explanation. This book and world have so much potential, but it was just not at all for me.

The first half of the novel was amazing and i was ready to give it five stars. The beginning scene was a real hook. It is about the straggle of some poor farmers against their oppressors. The character of the Guardian and his dog Strawberry picked my interest. However the second part was a three star. And the end of the novel just left me wonder about the nature of this world.