The review whispered of mean things, things that should never be put into words. Words that tore gentler things into pieces.

But this book with flowers on the cover that drew mean words out of her, the way it never said things as they were but rather in whimsical epithets, it made her want to slice the book's words into pieces so she could blow them far away, into the wind, never to be known again. Because they were useless, like a broken teacup. She felt like she had to sift the story through fine, delicate mesh if she ever hoped for a taste of its meaning.

////

Yeah that's basically how every single paragraph of this book reads. Way too flowery, never straightforward, and thanks to there being soooo many pointless words, it probably comes out to like 80% description and 20% story. The story itself wasn't super great—characters were flat and indistinguishable, magic system had no explanation, the objectives were not clearly defined. I spent a lot of the book wondering "what is the point?" The end did have a point, actually, but it did not warrant over three hundred pages to get to, because nothing actually happened during those pages. Not a torturous read, but definitely not a fun one.