The Nine

This one is typical for the type of books that have good ideas, start out great, then the problems kick in and you become a lot less enthusiastic about them. It's also... a first book. I wouldn't say the author used up her awesome ideas when she should have waited, but this would have been better if it was refined. In Corma religion and science got united, so the commonly held belief is that God is a scientist who looks upon the world as an experiment and people are just the rats running around in the labyrinth. The Nine refers to the nine most important people God is interested in observing, the nine who have to justify the necessity of the whole existence of the world. The catch? Nobody knows who they are. They could be the hobo down the street or the mayor. They also don't know what kind of an outcome is expected by God, what he wants to see or find out. Scientist priests decided they could approach God the most through hard work in scientific fields, but nobody knows anything for sure. The city of Corma is kind of shitty, though, full of crime and such. Rowena is one of the many, many street urchins who managed to find work as a delivery girl for a semi-legal businessman. Through her work she gets involved with some big things that endanger her. She has to team up with they mysterious Alchemist and a man dealing in some criminal matters to see the end of it. I remember reading [b:A Madness of Angels 6186355 A Madness of Angels (Matthew Swift, #1) Kate Griffin https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1305861910l/6186355.SY75.jpg 6366640] a few years back and thinking Kate Griffin was the most annoyingly verbose author ever. She killed her vibrant world's energy with overwriting EVERYTHING so goddamn much I felt like I wasn't even making any progress with reading. All the sentences had way too many adjectives that made it uncomfortable to read any of it and I quit three books in (which I should have done earlier, but I used to be an idiot with too much time) This one wasn't quite so bad at that. Really, some scenes flowed quite nicely. Still, it wasn't tight enough, some sentences made me think of teenagers trying to just... lengthen their works with these cryptic, emo sentences that they think are clever and poetic foreshadowing, but in fact for the reader they are just unnecessary fluff. My favourite example: “I could write about that scent pressing into my cheek a thousand times over and still not find the words to say how much it mattered.” Tone it down. Stop with the flowery crap, don't thesaurus us to death. Just do your fun ideas and different characters and such. This is not needed. Rowena was my other problem. She isn't too bad, she wasn't an annoying little snowflake who is too special and perfect for this world, which is how many teenage girl characters are written nowadays. But... she wasn't that great. It's especially weird because she is supposedly someone important. The side characters were much more fun, though. The Alchemist and Anselm were both kind of fun and interesting. I also really liked the scientist Chalmers. Luckily this book works with all of them, not just Rowena, so that works. I wouldn't say any of the lot twists were that big. You can see them coming, I think the most clever part about this book was the world building and the basic idea. On the other hand we didn't get into the big, overarching story too much, so I have no idea how long this series is meant to be. If it's a trilogy then I have no idea how we'll have any story that opens up the world, but if it's longer everything should be fine. Of course maybe I will be surprised. We'll see. I'm definitely going to read the next book, not because this was that much of a favourite of mine, but because I think with some guidance and learning the author can do much, much better. A side note; I love the colours and the artwork of the cover, I just wish the human forms would have been bigger, because they look good, just small. I am iffy about human faces being on the cover, because it can be a kind of... uncomfortable to stare right at someone when you look at your book. This one is pretty good, though. I like smaller authors putting effort into their covers, because that stuff does work. Have a nice day and pray hard this experiment works!