Bitter Medicine

This was the most frustrating read of 2023 for me. Rounding up because I think the premise was so great and I do want to see what the author does next.

Bitter Medicone has a lot of my favorite tropes and I was really excited going in but this book never clicked (though I desperately wanted it to).

I felt like the magic system and world building were never really explained and the pacing didn't work for me — most of the plot happened in the middle 20% of the book, with the first 40% and the last 40% being very slow. A lot of plot points were set up and never resolved, so I ultimately found this a really unsatisfying read.