1.75-2 ⭐️ best part of this book was the last chapter
not sure if this story was supposed to be serious or ironic because of how bad it is. i hope the poor storytelling can be blamed on this being one of the author’s older books, because i still have another one written by him sitting on my shelf… 💀
the ‘show don’t tell’ rule doesn’t exist here, pacing and events in the story are chaotic and the POV changes—while giving an interesting perspective most of the time—feel massively out of place at times. the book despite many fight scenes peppered throughout surprisingly lacked in the action department and they all felt copy-pasted, and too long whilst being too short at the same time, and i was mostly skimming over them later on.
for most of the story i feel like the characters were sitting around in the villa eating breakfast, drinking coffee even though they were supposedly being hunted down and that just made the story drag on unnecessarily; halfway through the story i was caring more for the captain Krčmár rather than the main group in the villa.
another issue—a lot of repetition of events, what characters do or think, or descriptions of characters’ appearance and their feelings—all that just became frustrating.
the FMC got worse and more insufferable the further in the story i was, often contradicting herself, changing her behavior and personality page by page (true bipolar kicia); and she’s that ‘generic hot girl who can fight and everyone is afraid of’—but that was something i expected from the get-go after reading the blurb on the back and the first few pages.
on top of that, the array of characters we meet, even if they were rather diverse were incredibly flat and unlikeable, neither felt well-developed, maybe because there were just too many of them.
overall very very mid, one positive thing about it is that can you breeze through the book quickly and the story is not super terrible, even though the execution is pretty poor