Book 1 in the new Everless series
AUTHOR: Sara Holland
CATEGORY: YA
PUBLISHED: January 2nd, 2018
GENRE: Fantasy
PREMISE: In a world where years of your life are used as currency, a girl goes to work in the kingdom of Everless, a place she and her father were banished from years ago...
MY REVIEW: My first book that came out in 2018! I'm sad to say...it was just okay. It pains me to say this was mediocre. I have been waiting for YA fantasy to get its butt in gear like YA contemporary has, but sadly, that has not been happening. There were some good YA fantasy books from last year, but a majority of them were from seasoned authors. Among the new authors, the only stand-out ones from last year for me were Caraval. Daughter of the Pirate King, and Daughter of the Burning City. Three books in all of those debuts we had last year is...not very promising. I was hoping this year would break that cycle.
Alas, this book does not give me much hope that YA fantasy will step it up this year. There is nothing terrible about it. It has decent writing. The world is somewhat interesting. There is plot, characters, twists, etc. My problem with this was the same problem I kept having with a lot of the YA fantasy from last year: it played it really safe (heck, even Caraval and Daughter of the Pirate King played it safe. I liked those books, but they weren't exactly ground-breaking). Everything in this book, I predicted from the first chapter. If you read a lot of fantasy, you can pretty much immediately tell how it's going to go. It's that paint-by-numbers. I could go on about how white and hetero-normative it also is, but I'll refrain. I even can't give much credit for the clever premise. The whole thing about using people's years of life as currency has been done before, in a movie.
I might read the second book. Because, I have had fantasy trilogies suddenly become amazing in the second book (for example: Rebel of the Sands or The Young Elites). I just am sad I didn't like this one. I really really wanted to like it. Again, there's nothing really BAD about it, which is why it will get an average rating from me. It's just...not mind-blowing and like other YA fantasy lately: played it really safe. Playing it safe is not good enough, authors. With the amount of books out there nowadays, you need to be better then just safe.
WHO SHOULD READ: those that don't mind predictable fantasy books
MY RATING: Three out of Five plot ideas I saw coming a mile away
No comments:
Post a Comment