Abandoned by Booklikes

Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.

I struggled to finish this. I had to keep reading this in between other books this weekend and finally finished this Sunday morning around 5 a.m. At that point, I was hell-bent on finishing this thing. I don't have a lot to say except skip over this book. It's not the worst book I read this year, but good grief towards the end I kept saying to myself who cares. 

When I requested this book from NetGalley, I thought the synopsis of this book sounded so good. Two young women, one thousand years apart from each other, hold powers that will either save the world or see its destruction. One of the young women is either the queen of light and salvation, or the queen of blood and destruction, otherwise known as the Sun Queen and the Blood Queen respectively.

The two women are known as Rielle Dardenne and Eliana Ferracora. 

In Rielle's story-line she has to deal with seven trials (always seven isn't it) in order to test her. Eliana's story-line a thousand years later shows her as a bounty hunter and assassin. 

I honestly didn't feel either way about Rielle or Eliana. I usually end up liking at least one POV more than the other when authors write their stories this way. This time, I was meh on both of them. I really wish that Legrand had split this book (yeah this is me who always complains when an author writes trilogies) since it made better sense than cramming two plot-lines with different characters into book #1. If she had, I think the characters would have been more developed. Even though this book is over 500 pages long, I didn't feel like Rielle or Eliana were that developed. You just have things happening to them and they react to it. 

Also a word of warning, don't start off the book showing how one of the characters is alive and then we jump back in time to show them going through some stuff. There is no tension then to me as a reader when I am supposed to care if they live or die. You already spoiled me on that. 

The love interests (I guess we can call them that) in this book sucked. Rielle's love interests are Audric and Corien (by the way, I had to go back and look up these people's names while writing this review, that just lets you know how little I cared about them). I don't want to have spoilers in this review, but let us just say one of these people wasn't even a real love interest. I just didn't care and wanted to kick something after a while. Also I hate love triangles. 

Eliana's love interest was Simon. Hard shrug about this dude. There was zero chemistry. I don't even get why YA novels always have to have a love interest. There is enough going on with both young women's story-lines that Legrand could have just had women and men there with no romantic entanglements. 

The writing was okay, I thought the world-building was lacking. I don't want to post spoilers, but I went huh a couple of times while reading. The flow was bad throughout this whole thing too. FYI, this is why it took me almost a week to finish this thing. Books should not put me to sleep, this one did a few times. 

One word of warning, I know this is marked as young adult, but this book has sex scenes. Which seems to be a new thing in young adult books. To me that alone would push this to the new adult genre. I only say this in case any parents out there were thinking about getting this for their teens. I would say ages 12 and up would be a good audience for this book. Back to the sex scenes, no thank you please. I don't know what was going on there. 

The book limps to an ending. Since this is already titled book #1, you can imagine a second and possibly third book happening.