What readers say
⭐️/5 and that’s being generous one of my biggest issues was the lack of world building. we’re dropped into this dystopian system with almost no explanation of how anything works or why and it doesn’t improve for the entire book.. still have no idea what the masks were really for and it truly makes no logical sense that the ELITE would wear them and get executed if someone ACCIDENTALLY sees their real face. the realism (or lack of it) also completely took me out. i found it so hard to look past. shadera is out here getting absolutely DESTROYED. stabbed, broken collarbone, broken ribs (multiple times??), head injuries and she’s just… fine?? no medical care, no consequences, nothing. a hot bath and our girl is good to go! i can suspend disbelief in fantasy where the characters have magical healing but these characters are presented as normal humans. at some point it just becomes impossible to buy into. the writing, while not AWFUL, was not my favorite. it felt overly descriptive in places that didn’t matter, while skipping over things that actually needed depth (like, again, the entire world??) and being in multiple POVs didn’t add anything, especially when the POV just rehashed events we already saw. if you’re showing something, you don’t need to also tell me the exact same thing again in a different POV. a lot of the plot points felt like they were thrown in purely for shock value rather than to move the story forward. the “traditions” (like the vow consummation thing) just felt unnecessary and there for the sake of being “shocking,” not meaningful. the characters themselves came off so corny and the villain was very cartoonish. he’s always ten steps ahead, knows everything, but we get basically no backstory or real motivation for why he is the way he is or how this society even came to be. also… enemies to lovers?? where?? that marketing feels VERY generous. overall, this felt like a bunch of tropes mashed together without a solid foundation to hold them up and it s