kirisuna
Now that I understand how these books were written (one weekly web series publication at a time) I am finding it much more enjoyable. I appreciate that this started out with Carl and Donut strategizing; that they had grown to a team. I also found the quests and such interesting. And I like the over arching Borat company arcs playing into the day to day of the dungeon. I’m excited for the next one!
Now that I understand how these books were written (one weekly web series publication at a time) I am finding it much more enjoyable. I appreciate that this started out with Carl and Donut strategizing; that they had grown to a team. I also found the quests and such interesting. And I like the over arching Borat company arcs playing into the day to day of the dungeon. I’m excited for the next one!
1.75 stars. This book is such a frustrating waste of an intricately crafted world that genuinely could have been incredible if the author had taken the time to make it so.
The world is built with so much care. Its geography, sociopolitical structure, and anatomy-based magic system all feel deeply connected, and the Cursed are one of the most plausible interpretations of vampires I have encountered. I wanted to understand the bloodlines, what had actually happened during the trials, what Nina’s father had discovered, and how all of those pieces fit together.
The problem is that the book makes those connections unnecessarily difficult to follow.
My first gripe: geography shapes nearly every part of the story, from politics, class, and culture to the relationships between different groups. Yet there is no map. The geographical aspects of the characters’ journey are essential to understanding the context of what is happening, but so much of their significance was lost on me because it was incredibly difficult to follow where anyone was at any given time.
The writing itself is not actually terrible. On a sentence-by-sentence level, much of it is not only readable but sometimes quite good. The problem is that the book is riddled with continuity errors, missing transitions, vague explanations, and emotional whiplash.
There are repeated physical continuity errors. Nina takes off her shirt in one scene, causing Max to look away in embarrassment when he enters the room. But the book never says she puts it back on as they continue their conversation and eventually leave, even though her being undressed was a central point at the beginning of the scene. At another point, she hides the dice down her bodice before entering the opium den, but soon afterward they are apparently stolen from her pocket when she never textually put them there. At Max’s casino, a suitcase and an entire collection of “her things” appear even though she fled without taking anything and never went back to retrieve it.
These details may sound small individually, but they happened often enough that I stopped trusting the text. Instead of staying immersed in the story, I was constantly trying to work out whether I had missed something or whether the book had simply forgotten what it had already established.
The larger continuity problem is Nina herself.
At the beginning, I liked her. She seemed capable, competent, cautious, and driven by survival. She was hiding a dangerous secret, protecting her mother, doing whatever she needed to do to stay alive, and clearly outsmarting the men in her world. But as the book continued, she became almost unrecognizable.
She swings from being obstinately independent to being completely at the mercy of the men around her. Her emotions jump from one extreme to another with very little development between them, and she repeatedly makes catastrophic decisions on a dime because her feelings get hurt and she chooses to react instead of asking a question, requesting clarification, or communicating with anyone.
She constantly acts to spite other people instead of making her own choices about who she is and what she actually wants. Then, once everything has gone to shit and she has (more often than not) needed to be saved, she acts as though nothing ever happened. The emotional whiplash is honestly borderline traumatizing for the reader.
That pattern happens over and over again. Nina misunderstands something, immediately assumes the worst, reacts at maximum intensity, and makes a decision that completely screws her. Then she learns nothing from it and does essentially the same thing again. There is no meaningful growth, self-awareness, or increasing understanding of herself or the people around her.
By the end, it felt less like Nina was a complicated or emotionally reactive character and more like the author changed her personality to create whatever conflict the current scene required. It genuinely felt as though the book did not know who its own main character was.
That also made the romance extremely difficult to believe.
I liked Max. His history of being experimented on as a child gives him darkness, trauma, and an interior conflict that made me want to understand him. His connection to the trials and the Cursed gives him an actual emotional and thematic relationship to the larger story. Granted, he was possessive, obsessive, and plenty of other things that many people would find questionable in a love interest, but I genuinely liked him.
What I never understood was why he thought Nina was such hot shit.
For roughly three quarters of the book, there is very little emotional intimacy or convincing development supporting their supposed connection. The book tells us that their bond is powerful and important, but it rarely shows us why. Nina’s reactions to Max shift from vaguely neutral to enormously positive or negative, yet there is no narrative progression building a foundation for either the relationship or the intensity of those reactions.
They fight, flirt, and then act as though nothing happened. In all honesty, it does not even qualify as a will-they-won’t-they. Their feelings seem to appear simply because the plot says it is time for them to appear.
The book also repeatedly mistakes vagueness for mystery. Nina keeps mentioning that people do not know “who she is,” and the story occasionally drops hints about her bloodline and abilities as though it is building toward some precise revelation. But the information is handled so unclearly that I often could not tell whether something was meant to be mysterious or was simply poorly explained.
Mystery should make me curious. This frequently just made me confused.
Even the action and character decisions often felt disconnected from the stakes the book itself had established. Max is preparing for a duel to the death with his brother, says he has no time to train, and then spends an hour teaching Nina a basic fighting stance so they can flirt in the ring.
After the fight, time is supposedly of the essence because they have to reach her mother before the experiment on the boat ends the next day, yet they take God knows how long to fuck in a slaughterhouse first—despite Nina constantly claiming that her mother is “the most important thing.”
Moments like that do not feel driven by character or survival logic. They feel like scenes the author wanted to include regardless of whether they made sense where they were placed.
That is what makes this so disappointing. There is a much better book inside this one.
The world has depth. The magic has consequences. The Cursed raise questions about personhood, exploitation, and who gets to decide what makes someone human. The trials suggest something brutal and institutional hidden beneath the mythology of the world. Nina’s father, the bloodlines, the Architect, and the experiments all point toward a story about inherited power and the way violence becomes buried inside systems people have accepted as normal.
I wanted answers about all of that.
But the continuity errors, unclear geography, underdeveloped romance, inconsistent characterization, and Nina’s complete lack of growth made the actual process of reaching those answers exhausting.
I normally finish books in one or two days. This took me well over a week, not because the ideas were too complex, but because the storytelling created so much friction. Curiosity about the world was doing all the work that character investment, romance, pacing, and narrative clarity should have been doing alongside it.
I finished wanting to learn more about almost everything in the world surrounding Nina while having absolutely no desire to spend another book inside her head.
That is a particularly frustrating place for the first installment of a series to leave me. Cannot recommend.
1.75 stars. This book is such a frustrating waste of an intricately crafted world that genuinely could have been incredible if the author had taken the time to make it so.
The world is built with so much care. Its geography, sociopolitical structure, and anatomy-based magic system all feel deeply connected, and the Cursed are one of the most plausible interpretations of vampires I have encountered. I wanted to understand the bloodlines, what had actually happened during the trials, what Nina’s father had discovered, and how all of those pieces fit together.
The problem is that the book makes those connections unnecessarily difficult to follow.
My first gripe: geography shapes nearly every part of the story, from politics, class, and culture to the relationships between different groups. Yet there is no map. The geographical aspects of the characters’ journey are essential to understanding the context of what is happening, but so much of their significance was lost on me because it was incredibly difficult to follow where anyone was at any given time.
The writing itself is not actually terrible. On a sentence-by-sentence level, much of it is not only readable but sometimes quite good. The problem is that the book is riddled with continuity errors, missing transitions, vague explanations, and emotional whiplash.
There are repeated physical continuity errors. Nina takes off her shirt in one scene, causing Max to look away in embarrassment when he enters the room. But the book never says she puts it back on as they continue their conversation and eventually leave, even though her being undressed was a central point at the beginning of the scene. At another point, she hides the dice down her bodice before entering the opium den, but soon afterward they are apparently stolen from her pocket when she never textually put them there. At Max’s casino, a suitcase and an entire collection of “her things” appear even though she fled without taking anything and never went back to retrieve it.
These details may sound small individually, but they happened often enough that I stopped trusting the text. Instead of staying immersed in the story, I was constantly trying to work out whether I had missed something or whether the book had simply forgotten what it had already established.
The larger continuity problem is Nina herself.
At the beginning, I liked her. She seemed capable, competent, cautious, and driven by survival. She was hiding a dangerous secret, protecting her mother, doing whatever she needed to do to stay alive, and clearly outsmarting the men in her world. But as the book continued, she became almost unrecognizable.
She swings from being obstinately independent to being completely at the mercy of the men around her. Her emotions jump from one extreme to another with very little development between them, and she repeatedly makes catastrophic decisions on a dime because her feelings get hurt and she chooses to react instead of asking a question, requesting clarification, or communicating with anyone.
She constantly acts to spite other people instead of making her own choices about who she is and what she actually wants. Then, once everything has gone to shit and she has (more often than not) needed to be saved, she acts as though nothing ever happened. The emotional whiplash is honestly borderline traumatizing for the reader.
That pattern happens over and over again. Nina misunderstands something, immediately assumes the worst, reacts at maximum intensity, and makes a decision that completely screws her. Then she learns nothing from it and does essentially the same thing again. There is no meaningful growth, self-awareness, or increasing understanding of herself or the people around her.
By the end, it felt less like Nina was a complicated or emotionally reactive character and more like the author changed her personality to create whatever conflict the current scene required. It genuinely felt as though the book did not know who its own main character was.
That also made the romance extremely difficult to believe.
I liked Max. His history of being experimented on as a child gives him darkness, trauma, and an interior conflict that made me want to understand him. His connection to the trials and the Cursed gives him an actual emotional and thematic relationship to the larger story. Granted, he was possessive, obsessive, and plenty of other things that many people would find questionable in a love interest, but I genuinely liked him.
What I never understood was why he thought Nina was such hot shit.
For roughly three quarters of the book, there is very little emotional intimacy or convincing development supporting their supposed connection. The book tells us that their bond is powerful and important, but it rarely shows us why. Nina’s reactions to Max shift from vaguely neutral to enormously positive or negative, yet there is no narrative progression building a foundation for either the relationship or the intensity of those reactions.
They fight, flirt, and then act as though nothing happened. In all honesty, it does not even qualify as a will-they-won’t-they. Their feelings seem to appear simply because the plot says it is time for them to appear.
The book also repeatedly mistakes vagueness for mystery. Nina keeps mentioning that people do not know “who she is,” and the story occasionally drops hints about her bloodline and abilities as though it is building toward some precise revelation. But the information is handled so unclearly that I often could not tell whether something was meant to be mysterious or was simply poorly explained.
Mystery should make me curious. This frequently just made me confused.
Even the action and character decisions often felt disconnected from the stakes the book itself had established. Max is preparing for a duel to the death with his brother, says he has no time to train, and then spends an hour teaching Nina a basic fighting stance so they can flirt in the ring.
After the fight, time is supposedly of the essence because they have to reach her mother before the experiment on the boat ends the next day, yet they take God knows how long to fuck in a slaughterhouse first—despite Nina constantly claiming that her mother is “the most important thing.”
Moments like that do not feel driven by character or survival logic. They feel like scenes the author wanted to include regardless of whether they made sense where they were placed.
That is what makes this so disappointing. There is a much better book inside this one.
The world has depth. The magic has consequences. The Cursed raise questions about personhood, exploitation, and who gets to decide what makes someone human. The trials suggest something brutal and institutional hidden beneath the mythology of the world. Nina’s father, the bloodlines, the Architect, and the experiments all point toward a story about inherited power and the way violence becomes buried inside systems people have accepted as normal.
I wanted answers about all of that.
But the continuity errors, unclear geography, underdeveloped romance, inconsistent characterization, and Nina’s complete lack of growth made the actual process of reaching those answers exhausting.
I normally finish books in one or two days. This took me well over a week, not because the ideas were too complex, but because the storytelling created so much friction. Curiosity about the world was doing all the work that character investment, romance, pacing, and narrative clarity should have been doing alongside it.
I finished wanting to learn more about almost everything in the world surrounding Nina while having absolutely no desire to spend another book inside her head.
That is a particularly frustrating place for the first installment of a series to leave me. Cannot recommend.
I feel like because this is SO hyped right now I had soaring expectations that were a bit unfair to the book. If I had found this on my own, with no expectations, I think I may have enjoyed it more. The writing is good, the world building expansive, and the characters (at least Carl) have depth. Some parts are a little too goofy for me and lose me a little. Also, some of the more action packed scenes that have a lot going on can be a bit hard to follow — I’m not sure that is the fault of the writing as much as just a lot of complex but extremely detailed things happening very quickly, and a lot of description around the mechanics of items and things that are a little hard for me to follow.
I do see lots of little crumbs that can lead to a super rich story in later novels, which I feel like is a hallmark of a good series.
Overall, this was a good book. It really was. I will be reading the second. It just wasn’t as mind bendingly, earth shatteringly incredible as everyone seems to be making it out to be. But maybe the series just gets better and better!
I feel like because this is SO hyped right now I had soaring expectations that were a bit unfair to the book. If I had found this on my own, with no expectations, I think I may have enjoyed it more. The writing is good, the world building expansive, and the characters (at least Carl) have depth. Some parts are a little too goofy for me and lose me a little. Also, some of the more action packed scenes that have a lot going on can be a bit hard to follow — I’m not sure that is the fault of the writing as much as just a lot of complex but extremely detailed things happening very quickly, and a lot of description around the mechanics of items and things that are a little hard for me to follow.
I do see lots of little crumbs that can lead to a super rich story in later novels, which I feel like is a hallmark of a good series.
Overall, this was a good book. It really was. I will be reading the second. It just wasn’t as mind bendingly, earth shatteringly incredible as everyone seems to be making it out to be. But maybe the series just gets better and better!
Updated a reading goal:
Read 100 books by December 31, 2026
Progress so far: 68 / 100 68%