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A review by hazelnutpie
A Venom Dark and Sweet by Judy I. Lin
2.0
I agree with the other reviewers that this series should have been a standalone instead with elements from this book added to the first one, bc more than half of this novel was completely pointless and there is a surprising lack of tea magic to make up for it. Near the end, the novel suddenly becomes a fetch quest except all the items are gathered already, and then the climax is so rushed that i'm still not sure what happened except we defeated the villain so yay? The epilogue mentions a time skip where the two mcs go on a journey around the empire and presumably gain actual romantic chemistry?
The ending felt very rushed and it felt like the author had no idea how to write it, so she just went with a very generic ya fantasy plot. There were a lot of dropped plot points like what the hell was going on at Hanxia, the allies of the princess in the palace (seriously why was that even a thing?), why Ning is touched by the gods and is so much more powerful than the other shennong-shi, was Kang's mother killed by the serpent, and so on.
I think the author is very good at describing scenery and food beautifully and creating atmosphere, but needs a lot of improvement in storytelling fundamentals like pacing and showing instead of telling. I read this book right after I finished the first one and even now I still struggle to remember the plot points or anything memorable about the characters bc everything is told in this monotone, detached narration style that is very unengaging (it makes the dual povs read the same) and makes all the characters seem very one-dimensional.
TL;DR: Could have been a standalone
The ending felt very rushed and it felt like the author had no idea how to write it, so she just went with a very generic ya fantasy plot. There were a lot of dropped plot points like what the hell was going on at Hanxia, the allies of the princess in the palace (seriously why was that even a thing?), why Ning is touched by the gods and is so much more powerful than the other shennong-shi, was Kang's mother killed by the serpent, and so on.
I think the author is very good at describing scenery and food beautifully and creating atmosphere, but needs a lot of improvement in storytelling fundamentals like pacing and showing instead of telling. I read this book right after I finished the first one and even now I still struggle to remember the plot points or anything memorable about the characters bc everything is told in this monotone, detached narration style that is very unengaging (it makes the dual povs read the same) and makes all the characters seem very one-dimensional.
TL;DR: Could have been a standalone