CB12 > Recent Status Updates

I am probably gonna hate this, but I’ve had it on my kindle too long 👍🏾

This is like a high 2 so I’ll round up, but it needed multiple rounds of both developmental and line editing to be a more cohesive, flowing story

The world building has great bones and I think it really did NOLA as a setting justice, but it had too many ideas poorly executed

The villains are also super one note: even the most narcissistic, abusive mother wouldn’t be like “destroy your soul and move on to the afterlife” to their own daughter. I love complex mother daughter relationships but this was not that

I hope this author eventually gets more comfortable cutting a scene short and just picking up at a more interesting point 15 mins - hour later. Does the reader need to be in 10 chapters back to back in the same evening walking through everything Phine is doing

Another inconsistency that an editor would have picked up: sometimes Moira is described as having curls, sometimes she’s described as having dreads

I don’t like in general when books switch tones in the last act in order to up the stakes by becoming gratuitously violent…like she was stress baking in the first part of this book and now it’s like mass murders every other page

Outfit and makeup descriptions after 70+ of her people were murdered like we whyyy do we need these details

More plot holes! Why are the laws of the world so flimsy that vampires have been around for eons and they’re just now extorting the witches for the ability to day walk?

I might even wanna read the next one dare I say?

Yeah the last act of this book is absolutely stunning.

Gonna give this 4 stars even though I think the first 3 quest acts could have been like 1.5 acts with more time spent in Troy with Alex becoming the empress. I spent much of my reading experience of this complaining, but the last part is just phenomenal

JA completely stuck the landing un plotting, themes, and character development

“But for me, as the fight wears on, the good wears off. Before I know it, I’ve made myself a devil.”

Mannnnn is Jacob of Throne a disgruntled nonprofit employee lmaoo

I mean: “it was, without doubt, the worst abomination ever visited upon by creation. Until one’s dumbstruck gaze had the misfortune to fall upon the front part.”

He is just an excellent writer..!!

I would give anything to see a fanart depiction of this monstrosity experiment thing Veega wolf is fighting right now, my god

The creativity is insane

Finally some good fucking food!

Julian’s strategy makes no sense….

Let me kill everyone who has the magic to give me the thing that I want. I feel the author could have killed off 1-2 characters close to Phine (or even kidnapped them) and it could have played the exact same role in the narrative. Clearly the massacres are there for shock value and the characters aren’t even giving the tragedies appropriate emotional weight

And if the necromancers were strong enough to take down vampires, why were the witches just sitting twiddling their thumbs for days while their people were going through it? The power scaling is off

It’s like the author wanted to up the stakes with the explicit violence and got stuck in a cycle of describing it to a point where the character’s eventual reactions to it days later felt ineffective

And sometimes Phine’s reactions to things feel delayed? Why did she need multiple nights of the (spoiler spoiler) witch murders from the vampires to come up with a plan for retaliation or to even confront Julian?

I feel like 70 of her people dying brought the point home? Also I def feel her remorse and grief about the situation (that she directly caused) was quite muted in context

Spoiler spoiler but I feel like what was promised as the overarching plot (i.e. the blight that was making the witches sick) got replaced with this whole vampire war (which, tonally feels remarkably more gory and gruesome than anything in the book previously). The whole plot feels just like a deviation from all the other threads the author has opened up and imo is being executed quite rushed

Gahhh after all the complaining, part 4 is actually really good to the point where based off this alone I would be interested in the next book

My other problem with this book is that the character does something and faces immediate consequences within the same in world day, idk the pacing constantly feels so off

Nothing marinates - it’s just a book of very long back to back days for the FMC

“ if a thing hasn’t ended, you haven’t waited long enough”… I’m a hater but Jacob has some bangers

You know what? I actually really love this reveal about Alex and what the JA is doing here. I fear this last bit may redeem the whole book for me. We definitely needed to cut down an entire act of this book with them just being on the road.

Even though we’re in act IV and there’s like 5 hours left of the audiobook, this section is the strongest for me.

I’m just not a quest story person, I need political machinations

Kind of crazy how every act of this book ends with a battle of Jakob dueling one of the brothers to the death — the plot just feels so formulaic, like defeat one boss, another boss comes up etc etc etc

Okay but “you need to stop clinging to the notion that there’s only one right path. You’ll spend half your time panicking you’re not on it, and the rest backtracking to find it” is a banger

I have to finish this book before the end of September

Why does every character have the same sarcastic sense of humor, I’m tiredddd

Also why didn’t she put the sos announcement to all the witches when she first encountered the blight

Every in world day in this book feels soooo long

So many things are over explained. the author is still learning what the reader does and doesn’t need to know, so a mor of things are happening, but a vast majority of it doesn’t matter/clearly will hold no weight

The first time she met Vincent was so unremarkable that I’m honestly shocked a romance is blooming

Feels random and I also don’t care at all lol

Random transient character doing something demonstrably evil to women/children for shock value so the mc looks like a just person in punishing them ✔️

The politics around Alex being the empress feels secondary to the HAR HAR “getting one’s head chopped off is a very unpleasant way to die” ass humor