You guys, why the heck does this book have such a high rating? Am I being trolled? There was no plot to it whatsoever, but even worse than that, it wasn't even written properly.

Like, even though the r/AskaCanadian subreddit largely agreed that Canadians use the spelling “mom” even if they switch between the mom/mum pronunciations, I can overlook the “mum” spelling. But not adding “?” at the end of questions? What in the actual hell?

Literally NONE of the questions that were followed by "I/he/she/character-name asked" had the mandatory interrogation point. LITERALLY NONE OF THEM. Who the fuck writes like that? And how/why on earth didn't the editor go to town on it with a big, bold, red pen? If there's no question mark after a question, that makes it a fucking normal sentence! Only situation where '?' are omitted is for rhetorical questions, because THEY AREN'T FUCKING QUESTIONS IN THE FIRST PLACE. OMG! I'm seriously so heated about this because I quite literally cannot believe shit like this can get published and charged for.

The use of punctuation was so atrocious I simply haven’t the words to fully convey how bad it was. And how unnecessarily difficult it made my reading experience: the lack of question marks meant I had to go back and re-read multiple sentences again because I’d use the wrong intonation in my head and also because telling and asking have different meanings—there’s a reason inflections and intonations in speech exist, question marks are not for decorative purposes.

These are from just the first little bit:

Not to mention the eye torture that was having to read written accents:

But it wasn’t just the grammar, punctuation and writing in general that were bad—hello exposition done through stiff, unnatural and awkwardly forced dialogues. There was no plot to this book anywhere to be found. Nothing happened. Nothing. The lack of any story development was so stark and distinct it was hard to miss. To the point that there were five guys: Myles, Blake, Theo, Liam and Nash, and yet our FMC basically only ever interacted with two of them, Myles and Blake, plus Nash on the odd occasion.

Like, ok, seems like the overarching plot will be the Irish mafia teenaged heirs’ quest to overthrow and overtake their parents’ rule (cue eyeroll), but nothing was done on-page towards accomplishing that goal throughout the entirety of Disobedient Pawn.

And, as previously mentioned, we didn’t move anywhere on the romance front either. Our badass naively reckless, virginal heroine barely just kissed one of the guys and only engaged in quasi relevant conversations with basically half of them. Theo and Liam were limited to hanging out in the background as little more than decoration and Nash she only fought with.

Given how these kids’ parents were so into the idea of arranged marriages as power plays and for political advantage, and how Nash, heir to the blood-soaked empire, was engaged to be married to a girl he knew absolutely nothing about (but I felt safe in guessing was someone important from an influential family in the mafia circles), I for sure thought it’d be revealed at the end that Ren, the mysterious girl that’d showed up in their mobster world out of nowhere, was it. But that didn’t happen. It didn’t even ever get brought up again. This girl that threw everything upside down is apparently—we all very much know she is most definitely not—a nobody.

So… yeah. An annoying main character that was constantly whining, boring love interests that got barely fleshed out, a ludicrous setting where idiotic kids thought they ruled the world and some of the most ghastly grammar I’ve ever had to get through. At least if the writing had been average, I could have had some fun fondly rolling my eyes at the over-the-topness, but even that modicum of enjoyment got sucked out of it. What a disappointment.