Bella Forrest

The Gender Game is a new take on dystopian worlds for me. I liked that they were divided by gender, though I did not like the way men and women were treated in each respective land.
Matrus is ruled by women and men are little more than an inconvenience to most women there.
Patrus is ruled by men, women are "owned" by their husbands there and can not do anything without them or a guardian appointed by their husband.

We first meet Violet our MC when she is trying to sneak her brother across the river into Patrus, since he was marked as too aggressive for Matrus. Things do not go as planned and both Violet and her brother are captured. Her brother is sent off and we don't really learn anything besides he was sent up north to the mines ( or was he?)

Violet has had it rough since her brother was captured and carted off, she has been in and out of trouble, committed womanslaughter twice and is now facing certain death. When she is given the chance to wipe her slate clean; by retrieving something that Patrus "stole" from Matrus she eventually takes it with the stipulation that she gets to visit her brother.

This is where things really slowed down for me, and I started only reading a chapter at night before bed. I couldn't see Violet in Patrus acting like one of their women. She was so lively and kick ass. But to be subservient and meek was totally out of character for her.

I won't give too much more away, Violet starts to finally come back into character. The retrieval goes off without a hitch, and then, of course, there is another twist thrown in. I'm reading the next book now, mainly because I need to know if Violet ever finds her brother.… (altro)

Pretty weak overall. I'll go along with the premise and will give the author (even though Bella Forrest is either using Ghostwriters or is a pen name) credit for keeping me passively interested throughout. But I just don't think the writing quality is there. It's very possible I'm not the core audience, I'm certainly not a young adult anymore so I should give the book some slack in that regard.

But there's approximately 300 pages between action scenes and you can tell the entire time that the book is not even going to try and come up with a structure beyond hyping up the reader for the next 5 books. It doesn't help that I was given this as a gift, when I'd asked for the Child Thief by Gerald Brom. I was keen to read another dark Peter Pan story, not necessarily this.

I'll hop off the series, but I'm glad to see many others enjoy it. Not my cup of tea.… (altro)