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A review by alexan13
Ace of Shades by Amanda Foody
4.0
Given how lukewarm I felt starting this book, and how long it took me to get into it, I certainly did not expect to find a new favorite.
But wow. These characters have my whole entire heart and I can just tell I’m going to be thinking about them for a long time to come.
There were definitely some flaws with the world building of this novel that made it difficult to get into and at times made the world difficult to believe — it’s detailed world building, but done in a surface level way, mostly through information dumps throughout the novel. But, the political stakes this ending left gives me hope the sequel will come through with the more substantial world information. And by the end of this novel, the atmosphere of the City of Sin had really sunk in, and I did believe in the city that reveals itself to almost be a character in the novel.
I’d also say the narrative style took a while to get used to — the writing style is pretty simple prose overall, but with artsy (and very beautiful and well-constructed! Truly some great lines, I will credit), deeply metaphorical, figurative sentences thrown in every couple pages. It’s not that this was necessarily bad, but it just felt forced and overly “”literary”” when the rest of the writing is not, which felt disjointed and took me out of the story every time it happened.
For these reasons, I have to fairly give it four stars. But in my heart and for my emotional experience for the final 60% of the novel, it is a new favorite for sure.
I seriously cannot gush enough about the characters, and their growth, and the s l o w burn of the romantic relationships and developing friendships through out. The plot too escalates from stakes that are hard to get invested to, into a truly intriguing mystery about a quarter way into the book. And the tension that is successfully established at this point does not let up the rest of the novel — I found myself literally tearing through the last tenth of it.
But wow. These characters have my whole entire heart and I can just tell I’m going to be thinking about them for a long time to come.
There were definitely some flaws with the world building of this novel that made it difficult to get into and at times made the world difficult to believe — it’s detailed world building, but done in a surface level way, mostly through information dumps throughout the novel. But, the political stakes this ending left gives me hope the sequel will come through with the more substantial world information. And by the end of this novel, the atmosphere of the City of Sin had really sunk in, and I did believe in the city that reveals itself to almost be a character in the novel.
I’d also say the narrative style took a while to get used to — the writing style is pretty simple prose overall, but with artsy (and very beautiful and well-constructed! Truly some great lines, I will credit), deeply metaphorical, figurative sentences thrown in every couple pages. It’s not that this was necessarily bad, but it just felt forced and overly “”literary”” when the rest of the writing is not, which felt disjointed and took me out of the story every time it happened.
For these reasons, I have to fairly give it four stars. But in my heart and for my emotional experience for the final 60% of the novel, it is a new favorite for sure.
I seriously cannot gush enough about the characters, and their growth, and the s l o w burn of the romantic relationships and developing friendships through out. The plot too escalates from stakes that are hard to get invested to, into a truly intriguing mystery about a quarter way into the book. And the tension that is successfully established at this point does not let up the rest of the novel — I found myself literally tearing through the last tenth of it.