by Griddle » Sat Apr 20, 2024 7:49 am
Currently reading "The Foxglove King" by Hannah Whitten with a group of friends.
It's... bad. But in the sort of way where there feels like there's a lot of promise in it that's just horribly squandered. Extremely frustrating! Our main character is described early on as being good in her profession of 10+ years, and then proceeds to fall and trip and awkwardly fail at everything related to it throughout the book, usually in service to make one of the love interests look That Much Better at it.
There's an obvious love triangle laid out between our MC, Guy A, and Guy B, but honestly she has decent chemistry with Guy A, nonexistent chemistry with Guy B, and then Guys A and B's chemistry is FIRE. Maybe it's my extremely low tolerance for love triangles, but I feel this could be neatly solved with a throuple? I've been informed that's not in the cards though. 😔
Anyway, my friend read this book, was DISGUSTINGLY DISAPPOINTED by it, and is now reading it to us because misery loves company. Everyone has names I love. The magic descriptions are really cool! I like the drastic differences in classes and how religion is wielded as a tool by those in power. I like how the religious texts have obviously been revised SO many times to the point where they'll contradict themselves. I dislike most everything else. We have less than a hundred pages left. I'm spending WAY too many of my waking hours thinking about this book. I hate it here.
EDIT: We finished it. We finished it. It's done. It got SO much worse. We put it down but someone should have put me down. It has a sequel and I've emphatically yelled "NO!" but. Dear friends? I am Afraid.