CW: graphic animal harm and death, copious amounts of violence, abuse, cannibalism, fatphobia, religious trauma…. uhhhhh there’s a lot - please look up a complete list on StoryGraph!!

So. This book. Preface: I am German and I read this book in English, which makes me overqualified and incredibly biased.

The good: Fletcher writes some ridiculously fun fight scenes and I wish the characters hadn’t been so overpowered so that we could have gotten to see some more cool moves and sequences. Also there’s a cult surrounding a half-dead cat and that’s the most realistic part of this book - please google potroast from TikTok.

The hit-or-miss: the naming convention. Look, I couldn’t take this book seriously AT ALL. A messenger called Tragen Nachrichten (Carrying Messages, but grammatically incorrect)? A thief called Stehlen Siealles (Steal everything (formal))? A fat and ugly person called Fett Hässlich (…you get the idea)? At some point you just have to accept that you’ll spend half of your time reading sending photos to your friends because of how ridiculous everything sounds out of context. I guess people consider German to be a harsh and grimy language, so I can’t fault Fletcher for choosing it for the names, but I have a ton of questions how names come to be in this world. Who names their child Gehirn Schlechtes and does this person know what said name means?

The bad: there are zero emotional stakes in this story until maybe the last third of the book. You simply cannot compare these characters to the likes of ASOIAF‘s Ser Walder Frey or Joffrey because nothing they do actually makes you feel anything. For the first half or so, all we see is people spitting and bleeding and being dirty and shitty. The world sucks but it isn’t truly dark… you need light to show you darkness. I felt sad for all the cats that got killed but character deaths or near-deaths did not stir a thing in me. It’s clearly a debut novel and I will not fault Fletcher for it - he does a fine job and it’s not his fault that others with many years of experience have done it much better. I will however fault his editor because I spotted many an error, which is a shame.

I can imagine that Fletcher‘s later books iron out that issues I had with this book (and drop the wonky German), but I also don’t think they’ll be a good match for me. I can see the appeal this holds for others, but am also fully aware of where my own lines of enjoyment lie.