Skyhunter

Eh. It's not bad, but it's not good either. It did have the potential to be really good, it just never reached that point.

The book opens with a fast-paced action scene which might be a bit too fast for me to bring myself to care about certain characters, but fine. We were just starting after all. But then the pacing gets weird. After Red is introduced as Talin's new shield, the writing suddenly becomes weirdly introspective, complete with flashbacks and nightmares and realizations that are so conveniently shared through a mind link. While the bond plays an important role in the plot, the fact that Talin and Red can just share thoughts anytime they want feels so... lazy. Like that way they can just resolve issues instantly, on top of trampling through the language barrier like it's an advanced Google Translate. Red also never really gets fleshed out beyond his past and nightmares. It makes the current him feel very one-dimensional, not to mention there's a lot of telling and not showing involved since Talin can just sense how he feels from the mind link.

There's also a looot of repetition in this book. Information is repeated time and time again, sometimes with a bit of a new addition to it. It just feels so redundant, not to mention the writing loses its focus every now and then. Like Talin sudden, thorough observation of Red when she was supposed to look for magnesium, or the Midwinter dinner. Maybe they were intended as interludes, but by that point I was growing impatient since all the flashbacks and thoughts and seemingly irrelevant scenes really dragged the plot. As usual, there is a plot twist near the end of the book but by that point it was no longer surprising or anything.

Not sure if I'll read the sequel since I really don't feel anything towards the characters, except maybe Jeran, but we'll see.