By Katee Robert
Thanks to NetGalley, the author and MacMillan for the opportunity to listen to and review this Advanced Listener Copy.
I love Katee Robert and “Sweet Obsession” is one of my top picks for best romantic reunion. So I was really excited to get this audiobook for an advanced listen from Macmillan.
First of all, for a Katee Robert novel, it’s very chaste. Which is a disappointment because Robert is my favourite writer of spicy scenes. Maybe she is trying to write something for a more mainstream audience. Which is understandable, even if I was personally disappointed.
This book took me forever to get through and I struggled with whether I should give up on it. Ultimately I held on to the end, but I am very conflicted about the novel.
The good: The story, the setting and the overall world building – excellent. Trials have been overdone in these kinds of books over the last few years, but Robert puts an interesting twist on the conflicts with the Tarot mythology. She has a very good knowledge of the Tarot deck and created a political system between the Major & Minor Arcana that Is believable and has a lot of opportunity for later stories. In fact, most of the book I kept thinking, if we can just get past this, the rest of the series could be amazing.
The bad: the female protagonist ruins the book. Kestral is one of the dumbest, useless, whiniest FMC that I have ever encountered in this genre and I’ve suffered through Violet Sorrengil and the FMC from Plated Prisoner with her stupid ribbons. This book would have been 5 hrs of a good story, but we actually get over 14 hrs of Kestral whining and complaining and repeating the same things about her poor pathetic life over and over again and actually learning nothing of value.
Did you know she grew up in the Dregs and her mother was executed for treason when she was a baby? Don’t worry, this fact will be repeated ad nauseum. She wants to find answers! We know this because it’s hours and hours of inner monologuing. Did you know that she starved in order to survive growing up? and that she feels she is responsible for several lives of younger children (not related to her)? except for some reason she has entered into a competition where she is more likely to be murdered with no benefit to the people she has left behind to fend on their own.
And why is she in this tournament? to find answers ! and some kind of revenge and retribution scheme. (even though she doesn’t have any information, she is adamant that she must seek revenge over something she has 0 information about). She claims she has been training all her life for this competition and she is a one woman killing machine, but, then she tells us that she only knows how to use one weapon (they had no access to other weapons), she has never killed anyone before, she freezes when someone attacks her, she can’t think her way out of a paper bag, she did no research on the history of the Tarot trials or the city she lives in or the political make up of the minor arcana and the centuries of power shifts. She is weak and can’t run for long distances due to growing up malnourished and starving. She is unable to hold a normal conversation with another human being.
She whines and whines and when she is shown that what she thinks she knows is totally wrong, she spends a chapter or two convincing herself (and the readers? maybe if they are dumb) that her initial, uneducated assumptions of life were correct because she is ANGRY dammit.
Also, she can’t trust anyone. No one. Even when they tell her things and say ‘they are incapable of lying’ because it’s a condition of being an avatar of a certain god, she still says “well, they COULD be lying about that”.
Her inner monologuing is so boring and repetitive that at times I fell asleep and missed chapters and It made no difference because she would just repeat what happened over and over again. I had to listen to this book at a significantly faster rate due to wanting to get through the hours of repetition and stupid inner thoughts that we have to listen to again and again.
In Storygraph I gave this book 2.5 starts which is right on the line between awful and good, because I may pick up the 2nd installment just because I like the where the story is going despite my hatred for Kestrel. While there was nothing wrong with the narration or quality of the audiobook, I will pick up the text version next time so I can skim through the massive waste of space that is Kestral’s brain.
