alphabotanical's reviews
273 reviews

I honestly should have realized the quality of this book from the clunkiness of the title, but I read it anyway. The plot is okay, very slow in the first half though it does pick up in the second. The characters could have been fleshed-out more from the pretty limited stereotypes they were, especially Clover, who proudly joins the ranks of adult fantasy milquetoast protagonists. But the main thing I disliked about this book is the lack of originality. It's about a magic school, and we don't know anything about magic. It simply glosses completely over that fundamental aspect. It relies on the reader being already familar with the magic in Harry Potter and The Magicians and extrapolating from the bare hints you're given to struggle to form a picture, because it certainly does not pretend to have any ideas of its own. The backward-looking viewpoint summarizes huge chunks of time that should be used to characterize and delve into themes. There's so much telling: we're told that Clover struggles to fit in at Camford because she's a woman and a scholarship student, but aside from the first twenty pages we never see it. She's too busy flitting around campus with her charming little friends to worry about magic and her scholarship and the broad inequalities that we're told have shaped her experience. Glossing over so much of this makes the second half feel completely empty. Clover's talking about the injustices she's faced--what injustices? You spent a summer living in Brideshead Revisited,

had a baby with the golden boy of Camford (which I have separate issues with that I won't get into),

and lived out your dreams. And the writing itself just bothered me. Plot events often hinge on some small detail of their days at Camford that could have come up easily in one of the long stretches of ignored time, but are instead thrown in out of nowhere and expect you to act as if this has always been the case.  Frustrating to say the least. .5 extra stars simply because I liked some of Hero's dialogue.