This was a good young adult novel. The main character was well thought out and grew quite a bit over the course of the novel. There were a few to many "endings". The book was very well set up for a second book in the series.

I seem to be reading books with a lot of potential and bad execution lately

This book was a mess in every aspect, from the writing to the characters, and it’s a real pity because the base concept could have made for a really good post-apocalyptic story.
The writing was really baffling, it felt like this was actually an unedited first draft. Dozens of mistakes, ambiguous grammar that made me reread sentences, prefabricated sentences that you see in every 2010s ya book that didn’t really have any relevance in here…and similes with never before introduced pieces of worldbuilding that have to be explained in the same sentence. There are too many and too long descriptions of everything, that manage not only to make the book and pacing really boring and slow, but that are also vague and don’t bring anything to the story, since they’re mentioned once and never seen again.

The prologue…oh lord the prologue. You know every author that advises not to start off with exposition? They’re right, listen to them. You can’t introduce the entire worldbuilding and premise of the story in the prologue and expect readers to remember all that information, which is, again, vague, and take it for good. To make things worse, the story has no fixed villain and no fixed objective. You can and should have different objectives throughout the whole story of course, but they have to make sense in a bigger set of circumstances, otherwise it’s just a succession of events that don’t feel connected to each other.
It really seemed to be reading something written by a very inexperienced teenager. How do you make digressions during flashbacks? How can you put important information in subordinates, making them syntactically less important, and introduce secondary characters making them feel important just to make them never appear? Was this sentence really necessary: ‘Jill leaned in and squeezed Zee into her large breasts, giving her a long, warm hug’? And ‘somehow’ is not a good explanation, especially in a fantasy book.

And the story... It could have all been solved by making two characters, that have known each other for a long time, who are basically family and in good terms…just talk. The whole story has no reason to go the way it goes, and the worst part is that you can only come to understand this at the end of the book. You read the book hoping for things to make sense and they just…crumble at the very end, making the effort of reading useless.
Characters and character dynamics are just as bad. Dialogues (marked by simple quotes by the way) are almost robotic. The characters just don’t feel human while talking, making interactions feel extremely awkward and pointless, since they don’t help make the relationships feel real. More than three characters in the same scene and it all goes nuts; a dozen soldiers have to capture two teenagers and only two actually act. What are the others doing? Are they just standing there and watching? Why does no one have tranquillizers? You have the technology to make the main character’s magic useless but you have to resort to hitting their head to capture them? And even in scenes with only two characters show that they only share one braincell: you are trying to escape a hospital, you spend ages memorising dozens of cameras’ movements and yet…you don’t even imagine that there would be a guard at the entrance? And why make characters forget information they already know? Why purposefully make them dumb? But what really messed with my brain is how the author thought it normal that a very, very old man (older than the main character’s father), who tried to forcefully make the main character’s mother marry him and have a child with him…become a love interest…of the main character. And an even older woman make inappropriate remarks about an 18 years old boy.


Other things that bothered me:
- References or straight up rip offs of other media: multiple Harry Potter references, the same glowing forest from Avatar, the Walmart version of Bilbo’s sword in the form of a necklace that doesn’t work the majority of the time, uncle Ben’s signature sentence
- The title makes no sense. It’s something the actual villain of the story calls her, together with ‘the destroyer of worlds’. You don’t have to call her names that sound good but that make no sense, so why?
- You can revive dead people by injecting the nice memories you invaded their privacy to obtain in their heart. Ok.
- The main character’s mother is a terrible person. She wants her child to have a normal childhood so she pulls her out of school, she forbids her from going in the village, she tells her to trust no one and not to make any friends, she doesn’t tell her that the wolf she’s been playing and hunting with is her father…
- What’s the point of physically hurting your main character and giving them scars if they can just magically make them into tattoos? To make them look cool and pretty? Can’t they just get…normal tattoos instead?
- There are basically two epilogues
- What does ‘Farr out!’ mean

Very interesting scifi adventure the characters and they're development was great and easy to follow

The twists and turns this book has will have you thinking you know what's coming them bam another twist!

Very much looking forward to the next book in the series thank you #netgalley

A very fun scifi adventure. A YA dystopian adventure with a cool plot and enough twists and turns to keep us guessing. I did enjoy the characters and seeing as this is book one of a series, I will be keeping my eye out for book two, as well as any other books by Renee Hayes!