0.5/5

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to even write a short review for this book really – 30 books into the series and this is the only one that I actively wouldn’t ever want to re-read.

Many events in this book carry themselves with an undeserved self-importance that is utterly cringeworthy and a struggle to read through. Main characters are entirely out of character throughout, while side characters are cliché roles with little personality.

Aside from there being very little of interest in this book, the worst thing about it actually is its actual construction; scenes and chapters do not flow into each other and reading it ends up feeling like watching a film with poor editing that makes the characters look like they’re teleporting round, appearing in places randomly to do things with no motive, or seemingly doing important things but in a cut segment only.

It was such a struggle to grasp what was happening scene to scene, page to page, in some sections that even on several re-reads of a paragraph or page things still wouldn’t be clear. In the last quarter of the book, I had stopped re-reading most scenes that weren’t clear to me, I just desperately wanted to finish the book so I could move onto something else.

At times I genuinely felt like this book was somehow gaslighting me into questioning my own literacy. I have read no book quite like this before.