Arti’s Reviews > Hell's Heart > Status Update

"You can no more understand it than you can smoke a painting of pipe." HORRIBLE analogy. You can smoke a painting of a pipe, actually, meaning you can tell me what the hell you're looking at and let me decide how I see it in my mind instead of lazily telling me "you'd never get it".

This book would have really benefitted from just dedicating itself to telling us the story. The amount of times now that the main character has told me that there is "no way" to explain or express what they experienced, it's just putting me off. At some point it feels like you are gatekeeping your own worldbuilding. I get that it's in space and not real, but this is a bothersome quality of the book overall.

I'm increasingly fed up with how often the main character will mention a well known saying in modern times but then have to follow it up with "but I don't know what that is". So you're fucking telling me that this civilization has been like this for How long and those sayings haven't been coopted into current culture? This book is so bad.

Still can't get through a single chapter without mentioning sex. It's overdone and is not serving any real purpose in this story. It's making me so angry honestly! Sex can have a purpose! It genuinely seems as though it's included for NO reason MOST of the time in this book. This book would be considerably shorter and easier to get through if it wasn't so prevalent.

Has there been literally a SINGLE chapter that doesn't mention sex, fucking, or orgasms? I'm so over it. I'm genuinely so over how much sex is in this book.

MC spent the first parts of this book mentioning how she's a schoolmistress/teacher and literally just mentioned "but then again I wasn't good in school". So which is it. I really dislike this book. Hate our main character. Really hate the prose.

I am so sad to admit that I think this book is turning me away from Alexis Hall's other works. I'm just not a fan of the prose. Her other works are not a priority for me to get to unfortunately. I wanted so badly to love this.

Where the hell is the kissing coming from. Weird. Real strange. Don't love this voice.