Meg
From the book's description, you are led to believe it is a story about magic, zombies, and love, but it lacks all of those in every account. It is established early on, as well as in the book description, that magic is the reason for zombies, or as the book calls them, cadaveri. This is repeated pretty often, and only one person seems to mildly care for a couple of pages before everyone just ignores it. Given the prevalence of magic use, and since nobody cares, you would imagine the cadaveri play a huge part in the story, but aside from the first few pages, they make maybe two appearances for the rest of the book. They are referred to in the world often, but a big theme throughout this book is that nobody really cares about anything.
Even the characters don't seem to care for each other. Silvie is injured and loses her magic, and it would seem like this is an unheard of occurrence to lose magic, but nobody ever talks to her about it or even asks how she is injured in the first place, let alone how she feels about all of it. The same goes for Silvie talking to Azura. They do not seem to ever get to know the other person, and by the end it feels like they like each other because the book demands it.
The world building is confusing, as it seems magic comes later for humans, following our world history of the Spanish Inquisition and the witch trials, but also has textbooks with the Sunday comics featuring boomer humor while still being in a more medieval time period. The magic makes no sense. It seems to be elemental-based, but Silvie controls a wolf within the first couple of pages, and then no other magic user does so again. Runes make an appearance at one point, but it genuinely feels like the only purpose magic serves is to do whatever is required for the plot. Speaking of plot, the book does not seem to have one for the first 80% of the story.
Overall, it reads like a draft. The book does a lot of telling without showing and lays it down thick with multiple paragraphs explaining exactly what is happening in a character's head. Not the end of the world, but the eBook copy also had a couple of spelling mistakes throughout, which also gave a draft-like feeling.
From the book's description, you are led to believe it is a story about magic, zombies, and love, but it lacks all of those in every account. It is established early on, as well as in the book description, that magic is the reason for zombies, or as the book calls them, cadaveri. This is repeated pretty often, and only one person seems to mildly care for a couple of pages before everyone just ignores it. Given the prevalence of magic use, and since nobody cares, you would imagine the cadaveri play a huge part in the story, but aside from the first few pages, they make maybe two appearances for the rest of the book. They are referred to in the world often, but a big theme throughout this book is that nobody really cares about anything.
Even the characters don't seem to care for each other. Silvie is injured and loses her magic, and it would seem like this is an unheard of occurrence to lose magic, but nobody ever talks to her about it or even asks how she is injured in the first place, let alone how she feels about all of it. The same goes for Silvie talking to Azura. They do not seem to ever get to know the other person, and by the end it feels like they like each other because the book demands it.
The world building is confusing, as it seems magic comes later for humans, following our world history of the Spanish Inquisition and the witch trials, but also has textbooks with the Sunday comics featuring boomer humor while still being in a more medieval time period. The magic makes no sense. It seems to be elemental-based, but Silvie controls a wolf within the first couple of pages, and then no other magic user does so again. Runes make an appearance at one point, but it genuinely feels like the only purpose magic serves is to do whatever is required for the plot. Speaking of plot, the book does not seem to have one for the first 80% of the story.
Overall, it reads like a draft. The book does a lot of telling without showing and lays it down thick with multiple paragraphs explaining exactly what is happening in a character's head. Not the end of the world, but the eBook copy also had a couple of spelling mistakes throughout, which also gave a draft-like feeling.