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A review by bitterblu
Ambrosia by C.N. Crawford
1.0
This was terrible. Which is sad because the first instalment was so much fun!
Imagine every fae romance trope ever written, put in a blender. This was it, this was the entirety of the book and even the prose didn't make sense because the only substance around the tropes was the words required to string them together.
Without the tournament plotline, this sequel had no structure. The author instead chooses to introduce unrealistic life threatening scenarios, over and over, to keep things moving. Often the same threats, encountered in different ways but to the same result. There is no real goal. Escape threat, triumph, escape threat, sadness. On repeat. And we move from each stage so quickly it gives you whiplash. Its chaos.
Characters travel across realms in the space of a few lines. One moment they're in a burning fortress, the next they're in a jungle... same page. And the burning fortress, and the reason they were there, no longer matters. If our heroes need something, a tool or a person, and are unable to acquire it before they are moved to a new area of the world, said thing will suddenly change location to stay within easy reach.
Its hard to tell where people are at any given moment. Time and space mean nothing and the stakes are never really that high as a result. Characters move from areas of the map with the ease of someone walking between rooms, and there isn't a magical explanation for it.. its just the writing. Everything else suffers for it.
There's no pick-up of things that were important to our characters in the first book and they feel hollow. They exist only for fight scenes, confessions of undying love, and self sacrifice. The romance is reduced to angst and melodrama, and our protagonists are 'chosen ones' in the extreme. I really liked Ana in book one, I thought she had a really believable arc and the way she grew in confidence as a person was enjoyable to progress through. Here all that groundwork goes to waste.
I could go on but I think I've said enough. Somehow I would still wholeheartedly recommend people read book 1, its nothing like it's sequel.
Imagine every fae romance trope ever written, put in a blender. This was it, this was the entirety of the book and even the prose didn't make sense because the only substance around the tropes was the words required to string them together.
Without the tournament plotline, this sequel had no structure. The author instead chooses to introduce unrealistic life threatening scenarios, over and over, to keep things moving. Often the same threats, encountered in different ways but to the same result. There is no real goal. Escape threat, triumph, escape threat, sadness. On repeat. And we move from each stage so quickly it gives you whiplash. Its chaos.
Characters travel across realms in the space of a few lines. One moment they're in a burning fortress, the next they're in a jungle... same page. And the burning fortress, and the reason they were there, no longer matters. If our heroes need something, a tool or a person, and are unable to acquire it before they are moved to a new area of the world, said thing will suddenly change location to stay within easy reach.
Its hard to tell where people are at any given moment. Time and space mean nothing and the stakes are never really that high as a result. Characters move from areas of the map with the ease of someone walking between rooms, and there isn't a magical explanation for it.. its just the writing. Everything else suffers for it.
There's no pick-up of things that were important to our characters in the first book and they feel hollow. They exist only for fight scenes, confessions of undying love, and self sacrifice. The romance is reduced to angst and melodrama, and our protagonists are 'chosen ones' in the extreme. I really liked Ana in book one, I thought she had a really believable arc and the way she grew in confidence as a person was enjoyable to progress through. Here all that groundwork goes to waste.
I could go on but I think I've said enough. Somehow I would still wholeheartedly recommend people read book 1, its nothing like it's sequel.