Unabridged Audiobook
The book started out okay and got better. Then midway I felt like I was reading whole different book. I don’t think I can finish it with five hours left. Don’t know what direction the book is going almost feels like I’m lost in a fog.
never have i hated a protagonist more than rin. so many deus ex machina too. not worth the time.
The characters generate little empathy.
Very slow and boring to start the entirely shifted directions and got violent. Some of the descriptions of the war crimes were so graphic and disgusting I had to skip the chapter. Not a good story and hard to follow combined with the horrors made me wish I never heard of this book. Should have a HUGE trigger warning for SA.
This is the most overhyped book series I ever read. It reads like it was written by a rich, spoiled, racist teenager—because it actually was. The authorial voice is indistinguishable from the author’s real life social media persona. The author’s xenophobia really shines in the book. For someone who aims to be the voice of justice for Asian peoples, she has a vicious hate for Asian people that don’t share her ethnic origins. I don’t say “her nationality” because she was wealthy woman living in the west even before masterful Tik Tok marketing made her a best selling author. The first few chapters of the book were okay, and if the quality and style had remained consistent with that, it would have been a middling fantasy series. Unfortunately the storytelling got progressively worse as the book and series progressed. The entire cast of characters are cardboard cut-outs with no depth. The main character never grows at all, and has no agency. This never changes throughout the series. The plot is an incoherent mash-up of plot points shamelessly lifted from superior novels. The world building is lazy, and just files the serial numbers off real world China, Mongolia, Japan, and some pacific island states, and uses real world war crimes and atrocities (like the Rape of Nanking) as a backdrop in a very insensitive way. This series is not marketed as historical fiction, or the lack of world building may be forgivable. What is not forgivable is the representation of the Rape of Nanking (a real world event).
absolutely amazing book 6 hours in and cant stop Listening I would recommend this book to anyone
a little bit slow and the main character is pretty whiny but the book was alright