My first new read of 2025 was a book from my Amazon recommendations. And I’ve finished it with quite mixed feelings. Let’s see why.

The book promises a story in a world full of various humanoid races with their own motivations, but it takes a while to get a decent idea what everyone’s goal is. Especially as the book is quite short, so it feels like you’re learning some things quite late – especially as each faction gets quite a low amount of space in the story.

The two main characters, on which the book’s description focuses, are told a prophecy that relates to their journey, and in my opinion, this tells way too much about where their story might go. This is one of the situations where it actively reduces the potential for plot twists. Personally, I think there would be a much better chance for the characters to be themselves if they didn’t know they’re destined for each other before they even meet.

Despite that, the story itself has a decent flow (and after these two characters meet, they have more pressing matters than wondering “is this the person I’m supposed to fall in love with?”), so for now, it’s yet to be seen if this might become an issue. I will be honest and say that this is just my preference (after all, I’ve mentioned it before that I’m pessimistic about prophecies if they’re way too detailed).

However, this book also has a fair amount of “technical” issues. First, the glossary is in the front matter. This might seem like a minor thing, but it occupies a shocking 27% of the free sample you can download on Amazon – noticeably reducing the amount of story the author shows and thus reducing the chance for the reader to get a good glimpse of the story if they’re on the fence. If this book wasn’t priced low as a series opener, I’d probably skip it. And, as I said before, Kindle books have a much better tool for glossaries, the X-ray feature.

Second, the book has way too many issues in punctuation and similar elements. Extra and missing commas or stops, extra or missing words, extra paragraph indents, lowercase letters at the beginning of sentences – mostly things even an MS Word spellcheck would catch, giving the book a feeling that the release was rushed. I wouldn’t blame the author for not using an editor – after all, I know I wouldn’t be able to afford one myself – but this is something one or two extra proofreads would catch out, given how obvious they are. I rarely let such issues affect the final score in my reviews, but this was simply too much, and I’m going down 10% for this reason alone.

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Read date: 19.-31.1.2025
Published: 28.7.2024
Goodreads/Amazon rating: 4,15/4,3
My rating: 70%
Length: 364 pages (Kindle edition)
My highlights

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Given the mixed feelings and the QA issues, I’m not yet decided whether to continue this series. Which, at this point, is 5 books long, so I hope the sequels are in a much better state.