Awful book from a great author

I love Penny Reid. I hate this book. From what I’ve gathered, it was written as a serial and released gradually over time in the author’s newsletter for free, then put together as a book with proceeds going to charity for a time, then I can only imagine they thought they may as well put it out there as a general release as they might as well get more money from it. Rubbish! You can tell it was free. All the positive reviews on Audible are doing the author a complete disservice because her other work is consistently 4 or 5 stars for me, and are so much better than this.

Penny Reid is a talented author with great characters in nearly all her other stories, but this book is underdeveloped, full of holes, with tonnes of talking about what the characters feel but completely and utterly failing to make you, the reader, feel it too. That together with the try-hard way that the book tried to tell the reader how incredibly clever the characters are, that they’re special and the relationship is like a literary classic love story (it’s really not), and how it referred to loads of research the author had evidently done into Russian literature at the cost of the actual plot made it a completely unsatisfying read. Poetic declarations do not make a convincing relationship. The book was also far too short to really explore anything.

Ohhhhh Penny. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m returning this and asking for my credit back. I’m looking forward to your next release though (..so long as it’s a normal book and not a serial release)

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