A Veil of Gods and Kings

1.5 stars. I see the ambition here, and the story had a lot of potential, but my goodness did it feel like an absolute chore to finish this book that had a promising start, but soon became mediocre.

The writing felt inconsistent, unpolished—simply put, bad. Unnecessarily frequent use of similes that were too long and an unsuccessful attempt at making the writing sound poetic, cliché lines and dialogue, societal commentary that was on the nose and lacked nuance or depth... I think all of this contributed to inflating the page count and making the story more cumbersome to get through.

Shallow, cookie cutter characters made up the entirety of this story, which isn't anything egregious, but does make me regret reading this. The characters also acted as very forced mouthpieces for the aforementioned societal commentary about sexism, rich vs. poor, etc. but it was too much commentary being attempted to be implemented while none of the themes of the commentary were fleshed out enough to offer anything insightful. The commentary didn't add anything new for the audience, and ultimately, seemed pointless to me and only made the characters feel more like caricatures.

A pointless POV character was another blight of this story. Hyacinth and Apollo are the love interests of this story. We get POV chapters from both of them, and also Hyacinth's sister, Epiphany. I still can't grasp what the importance of her chapters were. Her experiences with tacit sexism was a theme that could be more meaningfully and sophisticatedly tackled through Hyacinth's POV chapters. Instead, Epiphany's chapters offered nothing other than a meaningless and excruciating underdeveloped attempt at a romantic pursuit, and filler content that made the story boring and felt more like an interruption to Apollo and Hyacinth's story.

False promises in the blurb is something I wish I was aware of. The blurb makes the story out to be an emotional, potentially tumultuous enemies-to-lovers story with high stakes. The actual content of the book barely fulfils those promises. Apollo and Hyacinth's animosity could aptly be described as nothing more that mild dislike, that was unwarranted to begin with in my opinion. The story felt very... casual? Everything catapults at the end, and the middle chunk of the story progresses with not much happening; it felt very mundane. The stakes were established as something that would keep you on the edge of your seat, but the story not maintain that hope. Things were resolved too quickly and abruptly, and the romance was lacklustre at best, though not unbelievable.

This story genuinely started out great for me, but unfortunately, fell flat by the end. In hindsight, I can also see the pacing issues because the development of the romance here was not smooth, but I rushed through reading this just to finally be done with this book, so honestly it didn't really affect me.

I do applaud the author for creating a story with good intentions, but I just found the execution sorely lacking, even though I can definitely see other people enjoying this more than I did.