If this can get published, you can get published! Just do your research, get a few solid books, and build yourself up. This. This is utter proof you can do so much better and get published. Just don't expect to be amazing if this is your basis of what a book is.

Now then.

To start off I think a lot of the problems that are going to be listed below could all have been fixed if there were some serious editors working on this.

Like yes it's predictable but I feel like if it had an editor it would have cleaned up some of the errors and mistakes that really made it flop for me.

I am an ellipses slut, I absolutely love ellipses, I really enjoy them and writing and I really enjoy using them in my soft plots. I don't think there's a day that goes by that I don't spam a bunch of ellipses for no reason other than I really love using them for impact. Even in my D&D and other extraordinary writings of boring things over flowered never-to-be-published trash. I love using them as characters trailing off and thought, or just simply how they speak when they're dying.

Somehow you made an ellipses slut feel like there was too many ellipses and trail off sentences.

Shame on you, author.

The area of consent is so vague in this book that almost every sex scene is non-consensual on some degree. So for those who are reading this review, yes it contains questionable sex, and rape. There is no clear consent and some of these sex scenes feel extremely volatile and violent.

There's some really icky racism in this, for example the characters that are of color are both named after the tone of their skin, and servants. Not a good look, and definitely not the representation that anybody on this Earth wants right now.

I've heard some people say this is the worst book they've ever read, it feels more like this is the most incomplete book I've ever read, it's not on par with being onision's brand of incomplete and other random thoughts that don't ever finish. But it's somewhere on the level of just disappointing to the extent you're wasting your time with it. It's a time consumer like Colleen Hoover but without any of the shock factor in my opinion.

I felt like I could predict everything that was going to happen and then it would happen and my only response was "Oh, yep, there it is".

1 star.

Disappointing. ( )

Why this won a Goodreads choice award in the ROMANCE section is beyond me. ( )

I think this book is a combination of all the tropes I hate.

Poppy is not like other girls, but complains she wants a normal life. She is Chosen, she is Special. She hides her face but is conventionally beautiful.
She is immediately attracted to some guy. She can't stop thinking about his eyes. Every interaction they have feels unnecessarily sexualized. Is this supposed to be romantic? Because sometimes I felt the urge to pepper spray Hawke through the pages.

I can't with this book. There might be an interesting high fantasy in here, but I am too annoyed by the characters to bother.

(I did like her friendship with Tawny, though it feels very wrong that the only poc in this book is just the main character's friend.) ( )

Addictive ( )

Re-reading this as an audiobook was such a delight! Stina Nielsen does an impeccable job bringing Poppy and Hawke to life. My only gripe is that there was some inconsistency with the voice choices of different characters, so it was sometimes hard to keep track of who was speaking at specific times. ( )