Piper CJ

I loved this book from the first line of chapter one. The thought and creativity that went into the mythology and creatures in this world had me itching for a little encyclopedia to go with the series. I found so much of myself in both Nox & Amaris. The number of times I gasped loud enough for my partner to come running into the room to check on me. This was one of those worlds I wished I could crawl right into the pages.

I truly enjoyed the way the author handled some of the most traumatic moments the characters went through. I appreciated that the majority of the big moments weren’t as much of a focus as how the characters handled the traumas, whereas other authors will make you sit in the height of the tragedy in substantial detail.

I cannot wait to start the next book and see how our badass femmes develop.… (altro)

I am DNFing this book around page 200. The 1st few chapters were really interesting and I kept wondering what was going to happen and what the main plot was going to be, and then I found myself wondering what the main point of it was all 200 pages in. Not that you always need to tell what the main point is, but this didn't seem to be that type of book. It was VERY character driven, but the only things I knew that was different between the two girls was their appearance and which paths they ended up taking after Farleigh. The story seemed to rush from point to point quickly and without a lot of reason other than to quickly move things along, but with no main end in sight it was difficult to keep up with this moving. As far as the content, I could see it getting a lot darker after the point that I stopped reading which is why I stopped where I did.

I was also unaware that there was any drama around this book before I decided to stop reading it.

I'm giving it a 2 star instead of a 1 because I didn't HATE it, I just think it could stand to be edited a couple more times.… (altro)

So The Witcher plagiarism meets writing a book in six days.

I don't think if you can't handle negative criticism, or being told you need to improve in certain areas, you should put your work out there into a big wide world of people who are probably going to have both positive and negative responses. The author obviously had a very bad reaction to finding out that people didn't automatically like her book. Lots of people just like books. I don't like Twilight but my best friends do, I can't imagine if Stephanie Meyer went after me for disliking her book it would feel very childish as I'm one in a sea of many.

I don't know why I am surprised that people think writing a book can just be done in a week or made in such simple ways. This author is my nightmare to get assigned to or found and asked to edit for. I've had a couple of people who when I suggest edits and changes and removing scenes they just slide the scene back in afterwards, I can accept that they choose to ignore my advice. But I feel like any criticism equaling they get ignored means the editing process didn't even happen and they're lying when they said this book was edited. They had an editor but the editor seems like they're equally as shady?

But back to my lamenting about people thinking the post writing process it just never look back or clean it up. Your ego is no excuse not to improve.
This isn't how it works. That you just write a bunch of stuff in a week and then you post it and it's a book. I feel like as an editor that drives me up the wall, it's something that I've seen a lot of lately and I can't say it's not becoming more and more common. I don't know what started this trend of you just write and then you never look back. Always look back.

I didn't really feel like deconstructing this book so I'm just going to fill this review with good writing advice instead. You can write a book in a week and 3 days or even in a month. Writing it over a short of span of time does not automatically make it better, like saying oh I did this mural in a week doesn't mean it's any different from a mural that took a year. What happens is you need to be prepared for editing those books. Go back through reread it, reread it out loud. Does it sound familiar to you? Have you heard this story before somewhere?

Is this the story you want to tell or is it someone else's story you are telling? there's nothing wrong with a Fix-It fix you didn't like how a movie ended so you reroute it and made it into your own original book. But that's the key word: original.

If you're going to write for example Animal Crossing or The Witcher or even Mario as a book you want to make your own version of Mario you don't want to copy Mario from nintendo. Because everybody's going to figure that out eventually. I didn't know anything about Dragon Age and I can figure out when a book was stealing from Dragon Age. Stealing catches up with you. You can take elements but you can't take the whole of it or just the stereotype of it.

There's also the fact that when you write a whole book you need to go back and spend a couple weeks going over it, at first it sounds great in theory it sounds amazing. But when you reread it several times you start to notice parts that are annoying, repetition, things like the grammar is off, or inconsistencies with a character's dialogue. If a character has a way of talking they need to keep that way of talking permanently or they need to not have that accent for example. If you're riding a character talking drunk maybe keep their drunk slurring consistent. These are all things that have to be thought about.

Writing something, even a book doesn't automatically mean the book is good. You can be a good person and write terrible things and that kind of turns back on you. If you're a bad person and write terrible things, the way you react to books reflects on your personality. Good authors learn that oh that's wrong and fix it. For example if there's misogyny in a book and they didn't mean for that character to be misogynistic they can go back and write another book and fix it and have the character to learn. Editing it out right away doesn't automatically fix it either, people have all those old copies, you can't bury that skeleton again. A better thing is to have the next book have the character realize that they have these flaws and overcome them. Book one this character is racist, he realizes it's wrong, he actually starts to accept other people aren't this great nasty stereotype in his head and he instead, learns about them and educates himself. By book three this character is no longer an ignorant racist person but somebody who is apologetic for his old behaviors. that is a great way to fix things that you have made mistakes on as a writer. Your character not only had these flaws that you didn't mean to instill in them but now has overcome them and become a more likable character in the process. Development!

Build yourself. Get that criticism and grow from it! Do not be afraid to pave your own path but know you can't become deaf to all others. Not all criticism is good criticism, but if a big room is telling you that you have made a mistake, or even just the entire classroom.
If it's more than ten people you know saying no, there's probably a reason for that, if everyone is saying stop don't push on and keep going. Even if it sounds like you should keep going you should stop and rethink what you're doing.
I'm not telling you to give up writing, I'm telling you to look at it from a different angle and then approach it anew.

Actual book related comments I decided to tack on.

I can't believe she used the word betwixt unironically.

This book is overwritten. Bad prose. I don't think this is how many pride should be and I have consumed my share of poetry.

There are some words that really did not exist in the timeline that this is supposed to be set in, clout chaser is one of the most obvious ones but I saw several phrases that didn't originate until much later. I'm not going to terribly fault somebody because I didn't realize certain words were created and the 1900s and technically would never exist in an 1800s literature, minus time travel. It is terribly hard to timestamp all words and know what words existed exactly and a certain time. It's even harder to understand how the language works because as we evolve we also have people who create words, Shakespeare is famous for making up random words and now we use them. Before Shakespeare those words were not words. But it does annoy me that there are words that do not belong here and this time and they are definitely modern speech.

"He remained trapped in the shell of whatever remained of his person suit." Dude's really working retail life I guess. But nobody who isn't an alien would say anything like that.

I'm really tired of The Witcher being reduced down to orphans and monsters, there's an entire book series that expands upon it and shows that it's more than that. It's almost like if somebody said Assassin's Creed is just hiding in a hay cart and stabbing a guy.

Do I think that there could be some The Witcher ideas that could be turned into your own creation? Definitely. It's a very beautiful world and there's a lot of fanfictions that completely do their own thing and build off of it. But I definitely don't think this built off of it. I feel like this was just The Witcher but with nothing added that I needed. It wasn't even the best elements of The Witcher it was the most staple things people think that The Witcher is.

Really didn't care for the whole bisexual fantasy part because being bisexual is not a fantasy and it's a real thing, you can like your sapphic romances but you need to accept that putting those two words together has a bit of a negative connotation.

"Their eyeballs touched." Ew. Ow. How?

I hate that there's a character literally described as a token. Why wasn't any editor jumping on this? Red flag phrasing, please reread your own writing! Find those yikes, every first draft has them.

Speaking of yikes, describing a person's first period is coming into womanhood is a big yikes. For one thing I've had friends who have started their period as young as nine, if you're saying a nine-year-old can be sold off and utilize that way that's sick. A thirty-year-old woman should definitely not be writing about that, nobody should be writing about that, unless the character(s) is a problematic character or an ignorant character and needs to be taught.

Periods are not a sign of maturity they are a sign of the body developing and maybe starting puberty too early or a medical condition where children can get those and it doesn't mean that they're automatically going to grow. Please stop giving children periods and making it automatically sexual. Sometimes it happens and it has nothing to do with maturity or sexuality. Most of them are very young when it happens and they are in no way ready. Please do not associate it with maturity because it is definitely not related.

Misogynistic fantasy makes me so damn tired. I don't need these modern day fantasy books with patriarchy dominated fantasy lands. Go read Wheel of Time! There doesn't need to be a world where it is all run by men when there is often these magic systems and worlds of magic where both sexes have magic. It's really insane that in this day and age we somehow still think men are the superior ones even in a fantasy world where none of our historical events have ever happened.

For a good comparison nobody fixates on certain aspects of history as much as the patriarchy and these misogynistic books. I've never once read a fantasy book where a Rosa Park scene happens and a race refuses to get off of the bus and it alters the timeline. Because nobody is going to focus on that moment in history they're going to focus on the fact that women are inferior to men historically and I don't know why the obsession exists.

Expand upon your world's history give it its own thing that happened don't use our world's history because our world happened to certain way and in a fantasy setting most of that would never happen. Voting probably would never happen in most of these fantasy worlds nor would democracy or republicanism. I don't see politics usually being shoved into the fantasy genre with literal Democrats versus Republicans into fantasy so why should we shove woman's rights into these books and make it all about their fighting for something that they should already have?

Make your own thing, create your own world.

If it takes you years to make your own world history then so be it, be yourself and make your own original thing. And that goes to the author if she still reading reviews left on her work.

You too can grow from this, C.J.

1.5 stars, honestly I'm just tired of these things. Same old song and dance. Please don't publish your fanfictions, without editing them thoroughly so they cannot be traced to the original source.… (altro)