We should be more different than two people can be, and yet I feel so complete when I’m with you. Like I belong.

The Good
Let's get this sapphic fantasy show on the road! I really felt for Lucia. (I do have complaints though.) She is anxious, abused, bullied and treated horribly by everyone but her sister who even at times does not actually see/understand her either. The romance between Adelaide and Lucia was well done. I love how intense Adelaide is and how strongly she felt for Lucia. She wanted to love her and understand her in a way no one else did. Their relationship was my favorite part of the book and were when Lucia was the most likable. I found the world-building to be interesting especially the dynamics and history between the clans. The bits of language sprinkled throughout were cool.

The Bad
While I was interested in the main parts of the world-building, I felt there was a lot of seemingly unnecessary details added especially at the beginning that overwhelmed me. The reader is bombarded with locations, lore, and small tidbits that it can't all be stored. When given too many details at once I stopped storing somethings for later because I couldn't identify what's important and what's just fluff. Lucia as a lead character frustrated me. While I understood she was abused, manipulated, and isolated – her lack of a mind of her own frustrated me. I never felt like she truly had thoughts of her own, they were constantly influenced by outside forces. And her own thoughts and decisions were often stupid or naive. She never does anything herself, only when someone tells her to or tells her not to. I craved real character development and felt frustrated as it only came at the very end. I also don't understand Cassius. He tried to kill Lucia during the trials and then both Lucia and Adelaide are fine with him at the party. He then tried to kill Lucia again, Adelaide says they'll deal with him but nothing apparently happens and Lucia is will to hang around him again. This is not how any normal person would react and makes no sense. I think I just didn't like Lucia or rather having to be in her head.

Format:
Ebook — Kindle Unlimited

The Rating
I give this book a 3/5

Received from voracious readers. It is a world of witches, werewolves and vampires. Lucia is an interesting heroine…privileged by being one of the most important witch families but forbidden from leaving her gilded prison. At the beginning she attends her third attempt to Bloom…come into her powers as a witch…and fails again. As the story progresses she develops as a witch and a person . She has a massive lack of self esteem and is completely blind to everyone and everything that isn’t part of her restricted world. Through struggle and love she does grow up. Her lover, Adelaide, we know less. We only ever know her through Lucia’s eyes. However the ending leaves us with everything just as chaotic as the beginning..with a love story that may shift the world.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rep: Sapphic romance, Black MC

Need book 2 like I need air and I’m so serious like

“You’re so alive, Lucia. Let me be alive with you.”

Unfortunately, I don't think this was very good at all, and the list of things about it that I like is woefully short. But as always, I encourage you to check out the blurb and give this a go if you think it's something that you would be interested in. It's a sapphic enemies-to-lovers vampire/witch romance that takes place at a magical college of sorts. There a magical competition, a series of murders, and a tropey romance that I did think was really cute. (Spoiler: The romance is pretty much the only thing about this that I enjoyed, alas, and that's because I'm kinda no-thoughts-head-empty about certain tropes.) I really wanted to like this, and after I realised that I didn't like the writing, I still wanted to give it a chance, because you never know when things might improve. Sadly, it didn't improve. I honestly feel like my rating might be a teensy bit too generous...? But... nah, I've read worse things than this.

Some things about this that didn't work for me. Cut for length and very mild spoilers.

Spoiler

This clearly wasn't edited and it shows. Lots of typos and weird wording choices and weird formatting choices. You ever start reading a book and wish that you were beta reading it instead? Ever get that red pen urge? Yeah, that was me with this book. There were so may basic things that were begging to be tweaked. I don't think that the plot was amazing, but with some work it could have been a little bit better than this. Just purely on a mechanical level, the writing was rough. I'm always very gentle with indie books when it comes to editing, because if you're doing all of that on your own, it's a lot. But this was hard to read.

The world building and language/translation choices. I always think it's so creative when authors create a new language or lexicon for their fantasy world, and I can appreciate that after you've created something like this, you will want to show it off. But here, it was a little nonsensical. I always find it really obnoxious when an author writes something in a foreign language and then gives the reader the translation immediately after. And this was done ad nauseam in this book. If you're going to pepper in bits of your made-up language in the prose and dialogue, then it should be, 8 times out of 10, something that is easily understood from the context. You shouldn't always have to provide a translation for the reader. It gets so awkward and clunky to read. A basic example: "Dais Holum," she whispers in awe—Holy days. My sister if you tell me she said it in awe, I can suss out what it means. No need for the translation! Or even better: just have her say 'holy days'! Seriously, there were way too many instances of a phrases in the witch language or whatever, followed by the direct translation. Just let the reader know that another language is being spoken, but write it in English, unless the situation really calls for you to use your fantasy language!

(And I don't actually know if it was made up; perhaps the languages in the book were based on real world languages.)

This is more of a personal nit-pick than anything else, but I never tend to like it when fantasy worlds do a kind of melange with modern technology and norms. The author, as in other books that I've read and not really liked, has created this fantasy world with different factions of witches and vampires and werewolves, but there's also communities of humans who seem to be analogous to our modern society. So they have typical US American clothes food technology, et cetera. And I know I'm being picky, but I don't like reading that in fantasy, especially something that I expected was going to be high fantasy. Something that does, in fact, read like high fantasy, until the moments where you're confronted with pizza or a cell phone or someone wearing jeans. It's the laziest type of world-building. I'm sorry! I don't like it.

(But I know that there are some readers who do love when fantasy is a little more casual and has real-world connections, so hopefully I just convinced someone to try this book.)

This is written with a kind of omniscient POV. My enemy. The first person present tense was also kind of a weird choice, but I don't mind it as much as other readers seem to.

The general writing and plot progression and some character motivations and some character choices... a lot of it did not gel. Lucia learns about something extremely important and foundation-shaking about her mother in the early part of the book, and then she just resolves not to think about it…? And it doesn't really come up again until almost the very end of the book…? The school aspect of the book felt very amateur, because all the classes that we saw...how to put it? It didn't feel like we were observing people who are part of this world attending a school. All the information in the classes was obviously masks for world-building and info-dumping, clearly geared towards giving the reader certain bits of information about the world and history. A lot of fantasy in school settings do this; it's not an inherent flaw! But it needs to be written believably. A lot of the school content in this book was about basic magic, or things that would probably be basic history, and just general things that you would expect that characters who live in this world would already know. It was very clumsy.

…Sorry, I know I've already repeated myself a lot, but I have to get back to this language and translation thing. The author has different words for different types of witches and different levels of magic and all of it is completely unnecessary. In one of the classes, the students learned (or rather we, the reader, learn) about different types of magic. "There are six classes of magisk: Ariraan—divination, Ifyai—enchantment, Irujui—illusion, Oporaa—permutation, L'Paeru—conjuring, and Itoju—abjuration." Look me dead in the eye and tell me that any of that actually necessary. Can we not just say abjuration magic, or conjuration magic, et cetera? Do we need a different language word for it? Again, I have to stress that I am not opposed to stuff like this, and it is so, so commendable when authors do their fantasy language thing. But if it's not seamlessly integrated into the text in ways that are easy for the reader to remember, or understand from context, it's basically useless. That was just a fucking list! The same with the difficulty grade or whatever. "But there are six magisk grades, counting Asa-o—zero grade. There is Asa-o, Neno grade, Odua grade, Tri grade, Attan grade, and Quen grade." Are these words connected to anything else that we've learned about? No! I don't want to have to flip back to pages that I bookmarked every time a different type or grade of magic is mentioned, but that's what I had to do. At least, at first. After a while, I didn't care enough to really check.

(And I have to mention. Magisk? Silliest thing in the world. Just say magic. Or magick, if you must. I hope I'm not coming off as a hater who doesn't want authors to use creative words, because that's far from the truth. I just found a lot of word usage in this to be silly.)

I hate love triangles, no matter the situation. So the fact that this book had the audacity to introduce a love quadrant really deflated me. There's some line where Lucia gets a prophecy that she will have three loves and I literally rolled my eyes so hard. It's silly because we, the reader, obviously know that her love interest is the sexy vampire lady on the cover, and we don't care about her nice childhood werewolf friend, or the mean bigoted witch boy who is an asshole to her. Literally the only person she evinces any major attraction to (in present-day) is Adelaide. The introduction of the love triangle/quadrant really felt lazy, just like ticking a box. Just a way to introduce some cheap jealousy. “Oh, I'm writing a fantasy? Guess I've got to include more than one love interest!”

I could go on (seriously, I have dozens of highlights and notes in my ebook copy), but I won't. I really did go into this with the best of intentions. Even while registering that it wasn't good, I was mostly having a fun time until the 75 percent mark, when things started to really drag. I didn't love the plot and the world left a lot to be desired.

But I did like the main characters. So there was that! Lucia isn't the world's greatest protagonist, and she did navigate the world like a kicked puppy, which wasn't always very interesting to read, but she's the kind of character that you sort of have to root for. And honestly, I don't mind having a black girl being a damsel in distress. She's a sweetheart and deserves to get saved. And she wasn't always helpless; this is a story of her coming into her power and finding herself. It was nice to read, even if it wasn't written in the most skillful way. Adelaide was every single smirky, cocky vampire trope rolled into a blonde package, but I enjoyed it and I enjoyed her, so, no complaints. Maybe I was kicking my little feet. And I mean, I don't want to talk up the character writing too much, because it wasn't, like, amazing? But I had to find something to hold onto, and I think that their romance was cute, and the way they fell for each other was sweet. And this was pretty hot.

Ah, my kingdom to have this properly edited. It's a meh book, but there's a mediocre or possibly even good book somewhere inside of it. Seriously, I wouldn't write this many words if I didn't care, or if I didn't think it had promise. Or maybe it's already absolutely amazing, and I'm just picky! That is 1000 percent possible. Ah well! I don't have any plans to continue in the series, unless it gets a major overhaul. Maybe I'll check out the author again, if she writes anything new.

Content warnings:

Spoiler

some violence and gore, fantasy bigotry

“Why would I be given this depth of feeling if not to love, even after life?”