Gemma
DNF @ 15%
This year began I trend of taking risks on young adult fantasy and having a string of four and five star sucesses. I should have realised that there were bound to be misses. It just didn't occur to me that widely acclaimed Nevernight was going to be my miss.
On page, Nevernight has so many things I love. Assassins, revenge, what sounded like would be a fast paced and twisty plot and everyone on booktube raves about the main character, so I had unknowingly built quite the hype around this book. I ended up DNF'ing this book on page 64 (around chapter 6) simply due to the writing style. I liked that the flowery descriptions, but I found them to be nonsensical at times. No matter though, because I think that about The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater and it garnered a four star rating for me.
On the first nine pages of the UK paperback, the phrase “O, [blank]” appears on every page at least once. That got fucking tiring, really quickly. The narrator talked to the reader, and referenced the reader like an audience calling them “gentlefriends”. The footnotes felt unnecessary to the story, and gave the writing a smary feel to it. I have enjoyed books with footnotes before when I read the Bartimaeus Trilogy as a kid/teen, but I ended up skipping these ones. I just generally couldn't truck with the style of writing, and I'm really disappointed because this would have probably been a four star read for me otherwise.
DNF @ 15%
This year began I trend of taking risks on young adult fantasy and having a string of four and five star sucesses. I should have realised that there were bound to be misses. It just didn't occur to me that widely acclaimed Nevernight was going to be my miss.
On page, Nevernight has so many things I love. Assassins, revenge, what sounded like would be a fast paced and twisty plot and everyone on booktube raves about the main character, so I had unknowingly built quite the hype around this book. I ended up DNF'ing this book on page 64 (around chapter 6) simply due to the writing style. I liked that the flowery descriptions, but I found them to be nonsensical at times. No matter though, because I think that about The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater and it garnered a four star rating for me.
On the first nine pages of the UK paperback, the phrase “O, [blank]” appears on every page at least once. That got fucking tiring, really quickly. The narrator talked to the reader, and referenced the reader like an audience calling them “gentlefriends”. The footnotes felt unnecessary to the story, and gave the writing a smary feel to it. I have enjoyed books with footnotes before when I read the Bartimaeus Trilogy as a kid/teen, but I ended up skipping these ones. I just generally couldn't truck with the style of writing, and I'm really disappointed because this would have probably been a four star read for me otherwise.