Skullsworn

In the words of Ducky from Land before Time, “nope nope nope”

I hated this. I hated this with a passion. This is a bad book, and nobody will ever convince me otherwise. I do not understand why it exists. This is one of the worst books I have ever read. I usually try to mitigate my bad ratings on a book, like “this just wasn't for me”, “not really my thing”, “made choices I didn't agree with”.

But I just fucking hated this book. I should have DNF'd except that I wanted to get the complete experience. This book cemented its one star rating when our main group needed to pass a test and the test was to strip naked and jump in a lake and fight giant crocodiles. But then it got even dumber as it went.

This book felt like it was drafted by a 14 year old, and Staveley just went “yep, okay” and wrote it as presented, no changes. There was constant nudity for literally just the sake of being naked, like “teehee wouldn't it be cool if they were naked but THEN they had to wrestle because they don't like each other, teehee”. The philosophy in this book is garbage, like if a 14 year old and a 16 year old got high together and the 16 year old just started telling the 14 year old a bunch of wild, nonsensical theories about life and the 14 year old was like, “wow my brother is so wise and deep”. Your brother is not wise and he is not deep. He is 16, high, and stupid.

The ending of the book, which I won't spoil, I disliked every single aspect of it. All of it. Top down re-write would have been my note.

Anyway, my suggestion is don't read this. But some people love it, so I don't know. I don't get why, I don't understand whatsoever, but I am apparently in the minority for this eyestain not being worthy of existence, so I will console myself by writing this scathing review and hopefully in time, I will forget how much I didn't like this book.