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A review by marscandy37
The Jewel by Amy Ewing
3.0
This book left me scratching my head. I really don't know what to say about it... Which is weird for me. I'm not usually at a loss for words when it come to reviewing a book. But the thing with this book is that nothing special really pops out that I can point at an analyze. There was something missing really...
Violet Lasting is a girl from the Marsh, the poorest section of a weird island known as the Lone City. This city is surrounded by a massive stone wall...but we don't know why...something about a giant wave of water...
Violet is one of a number of girls with a kind of genetic quirk that allows her to manipulate things in her environment called the "Auguries". Changing colors, shape, sizes of inanimate objects, and making organic things grow. She is particularly adept at the latter. In consequence to her genetic quirk she is taken to a facility and trained to be a surrogate to the royal women in The Jewel, the inner most circle of The Lone City. These woman have some how lost the ability to bare healthy babies and so need the auguries to fix the genetic abnormalities in their fetuses.
We soon learn all the royals hate each other (but they don't really tell us much about why) and that they use their surrogates as guinea pigs in an imaginary race of who gives birth first. So that they can marry off their infant daughter to the head royal's (the Exeter and Electress) equally infant son (but we don't exactly know for what...)
I don't want to give too much away, in case anyone would like to disregard all common sense and pick this book up.
I'm not going to say this book was hard to read. It had great prose. There just wasn't much plot. I'm not sure where Violet was heading to. It just seem irrelevant. It read more like a day in the life... I eat this, I wear this, I like this. I couldn't understand why there was so much useless information. She looked at herself in the mirror like a hundred times. She admired dresses a hundred more. I felt like there should have been a point to that, but by the end of the book I didn't see one.
I was on edge the whole time I was reading telling myself that something big was coming, but by the end of the book I was wholly disappointed.
The main character carried the story along like a ball in chain. At times I grew bored with her constant moods.
I wish that the story would have had better character building. I liked some characters a lot. The Duchesses son, Garnet, was a darn riot. I wanted to get to know him better, and Raven, and what happened to Lily?
Another thing that bothered me a lot was the world building. After reading the whole book I don't understand anything about The Lone City. There is a agricultural district, an industrial district and a financial district. Then there is the Marsh. Why do they call it the Marsh...? I. do. not. know... It seemed all the other districts served some kind of purpose but the Marsh is just poor. This is a dystopian, so what happened to the world?
Also, I'm not a fan of instalove. She fell for Ash so quickly that I actually grew to really dislike him. I was waiting for him to do a 180 and betray her trusting butt.
I did like the names reflecting the places they were born and lived. Like Ash and Cinder, from the Smoke, and Pearl and Garnet from The Jewel. Or Raven and Crow from The Marsh. I thought that was kind of cool. There were some I shook my head at like Ochre and Carnelian.
I'm thinking I'm being a bit critical of it, but the amount of hype that this book received was so not merited. I was already expecting the huge cliffhanger because the sequels are already out but I haven't decided if I'll be picking them up yet. It may get better, like the sequel to the queen of the Tearling and then this book may make more sense, or it might avalanche into the absured, like so many other sequels. You never know. Until then this book is a solid 3 stars, because the writing was really good. Unfortunately nothing else was.
Violet Lasting is a girl from the Marsh, the poorest section of a weird island known as the Lone City. This city is surrounded by a massive stone wall...but we don't know why...something about a giant wave of water...
Violet is one of a number of girls with a kind of genetic quirk that allows her to manipulate things in her environment called the "Auguries". Changing colors, shape, sizes of inanimate objects, and making organic things grow. She is particularly adept at the latter. In consequence to her genetic quirk she is taken to a facility and trained to be a surrogate to the royal women in The Jewel, the inner most circle of The Lone City. These woman have some how lost the ability to bare healthy babies and so need the auguries to fix the genetic abnormalities in their fetuses.
We soon learn all the royals hate each other (but they don't really tell us much about why) and that they use their surrogates as guinea pigs in an imaginary race of who gives birth first. So that they can marry off their infant daughter to the head royal's (the Exeter and Electress) equally infant son (but we don't exactly know for what...)
I don't want to give too much away, in case anyone would like to disregard all common sense and pick this book up.
I'm not going to say this book was hard to read. It had great prose. There just wasn't much plot. I'm not sure where Violet was heading to. It just seem irrelevant. It read more like a day in the life... I eat this, I wear this, I like this. I couldn't understand why there was so much useless information. She looked at herself in the mirror like a hundred times. She admired dresses a hundred more. I felt like there should have been a point to that, but by the end of the book I didn't see one.
I was on edge the whole time I was reading telling myself that something big was coming, but by the end of the book I was wholly disappointed.
The main character carried the story along like a ball in chain. At times I grew bored with her constant moods.
I wish that the story would have had better character building. I liked some characters a lot. The Duchesses son, Garnet, was a darn riot. I wanted to get to know him better, and Raven, and what happened to Lily?
Another thing that bothered me a lot was the world building. After reading the whole book I don't understand anything about The Lone City. There is a agricultural district, an industrial district and a financial district. Then there is the Marsh. Why do they call it the Marsh...? I. do. not. know... It seemed all the other districts served some kind of purpose but the Marsh is just poor. This is a dystopian, so what happened to the world?
Also, I'm not a fan of instalove. She fell for Ash so quickly that I actually grew to really dislike him. I was waiting for him to do a 180 and betray her trusting butt.
I did like the names reflecting the places they were born and lived. Like Ash and Cinder, from the Smoke, and Pearl and Garnet from The Jewel. Or Raven and Crow from The Marsh. I thought that was kind of cool. There were some I shook my head at like Ochre and Carnelian.
I'm thinking I'm being a bit critical of it, but the amount of hype that this book received was so not merited. I was already expecting the huge cliffhanger because the sequels are already out but I haven't decided if I'll be picking them up yet. It may get better, like the sequel to the queen of the Tearling and then this book may make more sense, or it might avalanche into the absured, like so many other sequels. You never know. Until then this book is a solid 3 stars, because the writing was really good. Unfortunately nothing else was.