Book Review: Huntress

               welcome to my blog •••

      hi everybody! today i’ve got another book

      review for you all. this is the first book i’ve

       dnf’d since middle school— i just absolutely

      could not get into it. no hate to the author,

      but it really wasn’t for me. despite this, i’m

       still going to post my review. as always,

      this is just my opinion, and there likely is a

      group of readers this book would appeal to.

               the book •••

       the book this time is Huntress by Malinda Lo.

       i wanted to love this book, but i couldnt.

               trigger warnings for this book •••

       in complete honesty i didn’t get far enough

       into this book to get a proper feel for the

       possible triggers. if you are prone to triggers

       i would recommend looking up other reviews

       first to get a clear idea where this sits.

               my review •••

       I wanted to love this book. The description

       sounded good, and there’s so little sapphic

       fantasy out there that I really wanted this one

       to be good. Unfortunately all my hopes and

       dreams for this story fell flat on their face

       immediately.

      As a rule, I don’t like to DNF any book, even

      ones I’m really not enjoying; but I really could

      not get into this one for the life of me.

       For one; the pov swap— as lots of people said

      there’s too much pov swapping, and

      sometimes it flips back and forth part way

      through a scene. I felt like the authors pov

      actually didn’t make a lot of sense at all. It’s

      written almost third person omnipotent but

      not at the same time; the pov describes how

      multiple characters feel in the same scene but

      also tries to maintain one specific characters

      limited pov. Overall it just didn’t work.

      The romance aspect of it? I didn’t get far

      enough into this book for that to even appear.

      Honestly I DNF’d less then 100 pages in— the

      characters start having only met each other in

      ing/barely know each others names, and

      one of them has a prophetic vision where she

      feels love for the other one. Could that have

      been executed well? Yes. Was it? Absolutely

      not. We see this prophetic vision in the first

      “chapter” that’s actually a prologue. Two

      chapters later the characters talking about “I

      feel something for her— could this be the start

       of the vision coming true???” Without ever

      having a conversation. The character acts as

      though she’s already in love with the other

      one, despite having never had feelings prior to

      the vision. And then discussing how her

      chosen career path is one of celibacy and she

      dreads giving that up. So don’t? You don’t

      have to fall in love with this person you’ve

      never even spoken to? Overall it just made 0

      sense and was such an ick for me it was

      reason enough to give up reading this book.

      The third reason I gave up on this book was

      the writing style. This book is marked YA, and

      most “YA” stories can still be enjoyed by

      mature readers but this really can’t. The

      writing is very juvenile, like something a 10

      year old would enjoy. The plot sounds like a

      great young adult plot but the writing is more

      attuned to a middle grade adventure novel.

       One of the most common things I’ve ever

      heard in the way of a writing tip is “show not

      tell” which in summary means your readers

      should be able to see what’s happening

      without it being written out for them. This

      book missed that mark entirely. Instead of

      showing the characters falling in love, the

      author took the route of telling us the

      characters suddenly were interested in each

      other.

       Overall— 1 star. DNF. I wanted to love this

      book, but it really did miss all the marks. It

      might be a good book for a young queer

      reader who’s just starting to read romance

      based plots, and who’s looking for

      representation in their novel, but as a mature

      reader this book really didn’t do it for me.

      Maybe I would’ve liked it 10 years ago.

      Somehow I doubt it though.