Category: Reviews by Genre

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goodreads summary:

The novel follows Paige, a dreamwalker in 2059, her ability alone makes her a criminal. But when she accidentally kills someone, she is sent to a prison-like place which is controlled by creatures called Rephaim who want to use the voyants abilities for their own gain. She is assigned to a keeper called simply “Warden”, a mysterious man who takes a deep interest in her. (lmao you can already tell can’t you?)

I know this sounds stupid, but I feel really guilty for not liking this book as much as I should have. For the past two years, in every trip to the bookstore, I always saw this on the shelves and really wanted to read it.

The author creates a fantasy novel that is already familiar and fundamentally over complicates it by throwing in new words for things that already existed making it such a long-winded read that’s so overly descriptive, it all sounds original. The book, primarily, is a massive info dump, making it difficult to read. The novel prioritises action over a plot that makes more sense and better character development.

The characters were too dull in my opinion. You could probably kill them all off, and I wouldn’t care at all. They lacked any sort of personality or development that was built gradually. It felt as if the author only included such moments at the time it felt appropriate and useful to the plot.

Despite all the cons in this book for me, what really dragged it down to three stars was the romance. So forced and completely unnecessary, with no decent development at all. It literally comes out of nowhere. Paige gets captured by the Rephaim and is told that she is part of Bone Season XX. The Rephaite catches people and saves them for every 10 years to compete in this unique contest to see who gets to be their exclusive servant. Paige is then picked by the Warden to be his individual slave. And their romance is literally stretched throughout the novel, the gradual development just didn’t feel realistic because of the situation. It is a master/slave type of a relationship, which felt so disbelieving and was slightly uncomfortable to read.

Paige as a character was completely weak. People hail her as such a strong woman, but the author has literally only created a character with one good quality, the power everyone is using her for, and even she doesn’t realise it fully. She just felt too predictable. Also, I did like her growing relationship with Seb. His character was interesting since he was the only one of the leading group with no ability, but it’s a shame it didn’t last long.

I will probably read the next book in the series. Hopefully, the info dump had lessened, but the prospect of an eight-book series does not excite me at all, maybe the sheer number of books is what made it felt stretched out.

Overall, I think the writing is well done, and the action scenes were exciting and thrilling, but the plot and characters were all over the place, and the flashbacks which tried to give insight just took too long, and some scenes felt non-contributing to the book or could have been shortened.