Castle of Lies

While reading this book, I discovered one important thing about myself: I like friendships, and if a book can't even give me that... then what am I even doing here?

Castle of Lies features a cast of royalty, near-royalty, adopted royalty, and even some diverse elves, and all of them spent the first half of the book trying to kill each other and just being downright rude and not friendly at all. There was a heck load of back stabbing going on, and I didn't like it, friends! I am not a backstabby person!

Less than 30 pages in, there had already been several POV changes. It already felt like too many characters, and most of them didn't have distinct enough personalities for me to differentiate them.

At this point, I also didn't really care about any of the characters. They were all at each others' throats or trying to back-stab each other, and that not exactly my type of book. I want friendship, I want romance, but I don't want a story in which all the character have secret plans to ruin each others lives. (I don't know, I just wasn't feeling it.)

Things didn't start to pick up until page 55 or so. And even then... eh.

I wasn't really into this story. Maybe it just wasn't my type, but I also think that the first half was fairly hard to follow or care about. The ending was okay, but even by then, I did not care much for the characters. A lot of the elements in this book were not what I was looking for in a Fantasy YA. I think that others, who appreciate fast-paced action/arguments and strange kingdoms, might like this book better than I did.