by Clara O’Connor
In this book we meet Cassandra and Devyn, two star-crossed lovers who must work together to ignite the spark of rebellion in a futuristic world where the Roman Empire never fell.
It sounds amazing, and I love the premise. And thinking that it’s compared to authors like Marie Lu, Cassandra Clare and comps Panem and Grishaverse as similar world, well… it didn’t quite live up to it’s promise there.
So, I’m really conflicted about this book. On one hand I like it, on the other I honestly barely read it because it was too slow and filled with unnecessary details. The plot is there, it’s interesting, and I love the idea of this world. A place where the Roman Empire never fell? Now in some dystopian version of that alternate future? How interesting is that?
However, I feel like the author got lost in the desire to share this world with the reader, so much so that the plot of the book drowned in unnecessary details mostly included to give a sense of the world. It was there from page one and unfortunately only got worse.
I mean, I’m not supposed to be able to skim through a whole book and read more or less only dialogue to know what’s going on. And what I read was interesting, the intrigue of what secrets this closed in community had etc, I wanted to know it all, but it was frustrating to read when all I got was unnecessary scenes and details that just went on and on for ages without really moving the plot forward.
I wanted to like this, I really did, but I just can’t get into it without skimming over all these unnecessary stuff. And to be honest, by the end of the book, despite having skimmed through large portions of it, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. Which is a strange feeling since all that I did skip should have really mattered. Since it doesn’t matter, it probably didn’t even need to be there in the first place.
That said, I likes the characters, and the world and the plot. This author can write and it was a suitable language for the genre and I loved the mix of fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian thing going on here.
I have some issues with the relationship between the two main characters Cassandra and Devyn, their so called “connection” just didn’t feel genuine to me and it was as if the author really pushed it a little too hard there at the beginning. It was like “love at first sight” high on drugs. The boy was undescript and skinny and apparently Cassandra couldn’t find such a guy attractive so he sort of “had to be hiding his true muscular and gorgeous self somewhere using magic or whatever. Also, she didn’t remember him, but then she states that she knew him, then that she didn’t and well, they just go back and forth and even seem to completely forget each other there for a moment in the book.
And maybe (probably) I missed something here too, but wasn’t this supposed to be the Roman Empire? So why do they keep taking about Hades? Isn’t he a Greek God?
Thank you NetGalley for providing me with an ARC for this book.
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