Michelle Manus

I dropped this in chapter 10.
It's just not good. The world itself is fascinating and I would love to learn more about it but the actual plot is very contrived and the characters are unbelievable.
So far it has been a fantasy adventure mixed with power fantasy wish fulfillment with little regard for consistent characters.

I am failing to properly describe what exactly it is that is wrong with this book but I can't find the words to express myself better so here we go.

The premise is the MC is being forced into a mind-bogglingly restrictive role without any preparation. But she just takes everything like it's not a big deal. The book utterly fails to convince me that the MC is a person with human emotions. But with these types of books, you kind of have to allow the book its premise even if it's questionable.
But it just keeps going, one strange situation after another and all the tired tropes you could possibly think of without any interesting twist or nuance on any of it.
The main focus of the story is strong female characters but it goes about it in the most typical and shallow way imaginable by making them badass, op af assholes. But at the same time, the MC is this naive, innocent goodie-two-shoes that can not hurt others to save her life.
The thing that broke the camel's back was guards casually getting killed and nobody caring about it because they are just guards and why the fuck would anyone care about people that are not protagonists. Certainly not the MC. It's only bad if you are the one doing the killing. But deliberately causing it to save your own hide is no problem whatsoever.
There is one throw-away sentence or another devoted to these problems but none of it sticks as far as I could tell.
Maybe I am doing the book an injustice here because I haven't read it in its entirety and maybe all this emotional baggage will eventually be handled in a believable and nuanced way but I very much doubt it.
And while that is probably the most glaring example there are lots of more minor cases of this kind of strange/unnatural and contradictory behavior.
This book is trying to do something amazing but takes one wrong step after another. It's not any individual failing that robbed me of any and all enjoyment reading this, but the sheer number of them. Emotion is very obviously only ever employed to serve the purpose of spicing up individual scenes and doesn't seem to persist beyond that. These characters seem to mainly just serve as tools to do things the author thought would make for cool scenes which reads very much like wish-fulfillment fan-fiction.
It makes it very hard to empathize with anyone not to mention take the protagonists seriously.
It's just a lot of good ideas very poorly executed.

And sadly there really aren't any redeeming qualities either. It's just tired tropes meshed together in yet another almost indistinguishable configuration without anything original.… (mer)