Callysta

Update 01/13/24:

I've finally finished this book. I can say only one thing - MC is a fucking psychopath. Literally. Only a psychopath could kill a person and five minutes later have sex. She had never done this before, she was not psychologically trained to be a killer. She must feel a huge number of emotions, not just anger! You cannot justify this with anything. She doesn't feel the slightest remorse. If I were her, I would have experienced shock, at least, turning into severe PTSD. I'm autistic, but I know what EMPATHY is. However, the main character of this book is not familiar with it. It's disturbing and disgusting.

November, 2023:

Soft dnf at 57%. I'm really intrigued by the story but some aspects of it annoy me so much I cannot force myself to read further.

First of all, I wished this book was a little bit longer in the first third so we could learn more about our main characters, especially viscount. Second, I feel like this story is lacking in the emotional department. It would be great if the author fleshed out the characters a little bit more. There were so many descriptions of dresses swishing around the ankles, and how sweet honeysuckles smell (and don't get me started on how green our love interest's eyes are!) but we don't really know how our heroine feels. Her feelings and emotions are surface-leveled, and this is why, I'm afraid, I think she's so unlikable. Even before the events of chapter fourteen, she treated her closest people - people who love and care about her - like trash and then had the audacity to be offended by their actions. To be clear, I'm not talking about Lord Gray. What he did was disgusting. If only the author showed us a little more of Adelina's internal struggles... but all we saw was a young woman who throws tantrums. Like, girl you treat a person who keeps your secret, like shit, and then get shocked by the consequences of your stupidity and pride? And all this because of the man you barely know. Man, who basically SA you! Honestly, after this scene, I stopped caring about viscount. How on earth I can thirsting for a person who doesn't give a f*ck when a woman says 'no', 'let me go', 'don't touch me' and then forcefully kiss her? He probably has an explanation but I don't care 'cause it doesn't change what he did. And I haven't even started yet about how he sneaked into our heroine's mind without permission. Man, how many boundaries do you wanna cross before we know ANYTHING about you?
To put it mildly, I have an issue with this story but I want to know what secrets our heroine's past hides, so I plan to return to this book when I cool down a little.

10 out 5.

Just imagine that someone writes a book where all Americans are racist fascists in Trump T-shirts, who sit on the porch with a bottle of whiskey in their hands and shoot with a shotgun at anyone who steps on their lawn. Approximately the same thing was done by the author of this book in relation to the Ukrainians.

It's a solid three stars read for me. I'm not a native English speaker and can say that was an easy read. I can't say that much about the world-building but the characters were interesting especially the protagonist. As a woman, I rarely enjoy female characters in fantasy books written by man but Khlid was okay. The main reason I gave this story only three stars is the plot. It was too predictable. Like, TOO damn predictable. The first 30% of the book were very interesting and I thought I'll give it 4.5 stars but then it went downhill and I predicted basically all plot twists. I'll definitely read a novel when it came out.

The actual book is a 3-star read for me but the Russian translation is awful. Never in my life have I read something that terrible. I have no idea HOW it was published like this. Google translate would have done a better job than the one who translated this book. It's not readable. At some point, I had to look for the original, because I did not understand anything. And if in the first chapters there was still some hint of meaning and logic in the construction of sentences and phrases, then in the end it was a set of words that even in Russian does not make sense.
But this book had not only a translator. A whole staff of workers stood behind it: editors, proofreaders, etc. But they did not even correct banal errors (for example, they left TWO VARIANTS of the translation of the same phrase in the text, which the translator forgot to remove from the final draft). How could this happen? Why don't people do their job?

Four stars. Most of all I wanted to know about Irina and Mirnatius fate's, but for some reason author decided that it didn't matter.

Это были бы пять звёзд, если бы Джордан не решил разрушить женскую дружбу ради мужика.