dbguide2's reviews
664 reviews

 As I said earlier, this was quite an interesting read. For the most part, and just as I’d finished, I decided on 3 stars, maybe add on a .5 stars for the vampires. Now it’s a solid 4 stars. Did I like the main characters? No, they’re terrible. But they’re meant to be terrible and they’re written great (in that sense). If you like unlikeable characters I recommend this book! 

It’s not that I don’t like unlikeable characters, I do, I also tend to get really annoyed with characters if they annoy me. I’m aware of how it doesn’t make sense. For this book I liked the male main character (Susenyos) way more than the female one. Arguably, he’s definitely the worst as he’s a vampire and doesn’t care about silly human things like morals and values. The female lead (Kidan) hated Susenyos for being a vampire and doing bad things but like you knew that? In this world vampires are extremely bad. They’re not sparkly romantic ones like Twilight. They’re terrible! But I did like that she herself felt connected to those dark areas of Susenyos and disliked herself for that. Somehow I think that made me like her more – like her disliking herself led to me liking her more. 

 I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I love world-building. With paranormal creatures the lore is built into the world-building so it’s technically more world-building, which is great for me. Plus the creature lore is almost always different every time. That was definitely the case here. Girma created new and really interesting vampires and explained their rules in different ways – through the classes, Kidan interacting with Susenyos, through her learning about her family’s history. Made for quite an interesting reading experience. 

I also liked the other characters we got to know to. I’ll admit, I didn’t like Slen as Kidan’s friend but then I read her sporting a South African pin so I feel like I have to support (as a fellow South African). I’d probably say Taj (Susenyos’s friend, another vampire) and GK, a student in Kidan’s class were my favorites of the supporting characters. I will say that I didn’t like June. I didn’t get her and Kidan’s relationship; maybe that’s why I disliked Kidan a bit – she was so focused on finding her sister but I didn’t see the relationship between them. Maybe that’s just me. 

The action in this is largely in the background as it’s more psychological. The focus isn’t so much on action and vampires lighting each other – which is a difference from other vampires books, maybe that’s another reason why I didn’t like this so much. I’m so used to vampires fighting and high action plots and scenes in books. One thing I definitely won’t be able to do is attend this university because I half understand everything they said – but that’s okay! 

I originally had the e-arc and I think I must’ve deleted this off my Kindle whilst going through my arcs. Since it’s a 2022 arc (yes, I know, quite late but this is what we do), the e-arc was archived. Only the audiobook was available for me from the library. Unfortunately I think that might’ve added to my reason to dnf? I didn’t like the narrators. 

Furthermore I didn’t feel like the characters were interesting, at all. I think I maybe was more interested in the past characters but only because I wanted to see what would happen to them, not their personalities. I didn’t really care much for the characters in the present. I think the writing wasn’t really capturing my attention so all of together just had me click the dnf button 

I started out liking it, which is good, but started to see issues early on. I tried to just push through and stopped when I found myself just tapping to the next page. I know when I do that then it’s time to stop reading. I did really want to like it but there were glaring issues and I couldn’t close my eyes to them.

Most of the time I love it when a book reads like fanfiction, all right? It’s great, it reads easy for me, I want to keep reading and I’d love for there to be fanfiction of that book. This book, however, reads like fanfiction in the bad way. There’s no real characterisation or development because the author assumes we already know the characters from the media (whatever the format) and therefore chooses not to change their personalities. Although in here they just didn’t really have any personalities. So rather stop reading than try to carry on.