rmarcher's reviews
432 reviews

3.5 stars.

It's been a really long time since I read the first two books in this series, so I was reading this with very little memory of the events previous. Fortunately, I was able to mostly piece together the important events.
Since reading the first two books, I've come to like first person and limited third person much better than third person omniscient, but I was able to adjust to that okay, too.
My main problem with the book was that the content felt more YA (not to a huge extent, but enough) and the writing felt very, very middle-grade. There was wayyyyy more telling than showing. I wanted to be able to see and feel the characters' emotions, not just be told that they were worried or confident or whatever. I wanted to be able to read into the subtext of the dialogue without being constantly aware of the characters' goals.
Despite this, I enjoyed the characters and story. I particularly enjoyed following Halt and Horace's part of the journey, and I thought Halt's plan to follow Will was clever. Kind of stupid, but clever. XD
Overall it's not my favorite, but I did enjoy it and I'm still looking to read the remainder of the series.

Rating: 4.5 stars

I wouldn't recommend this one due to content issues (mostly of the violent, sexual [no explicit scenes, but a lot of implications/questionable situations], and [if this bothers you] magical variety), but I personally thought it was well-done and I really enjoyed the characters, their relationships, and the worldbuilding.
It was also really predictable, but with the author's foreword and with the characters and everything else to tide it over, I didn't mind terribly.

I wanted to like this book. I've been trying to find good desert fantasy since I began designing a desert fantasy world of my own, and I've found one, which was not this one. This one... It just wasn't for me. It was very clear that my worldview is quite different from that of the author, and I just felt like this book dwelt too much on the depravity of the way the fantasy world is set up without enough balance of light and hope. Which might have been due to it being the first book of a series, maybe it gets better, but there are multiple reasons I won't be sticking around to find out.

(This review may be considered to contain mild spoilers regarding character relationship development.)

Elias, I love you, but you need to get your mind out of the gutter. That kind of thinking is not okay, even if you don't act on it like Marcus. It's just not. You've got to keep a tighter rein on that stuff.
Other than being a mild creep that I didn't really enjoy being in the mind of sometimes, Elias was a decent character. I appreciated that he saw the corruption for what it was and was willing to do something about it... even if it took him forever. Again, I'd probably enjoy him better in the second book, now that he's hit the part of his arc that he's hit.

Laia... I can't think of anything that was actually wrong with her character, when I try to think through it from a craft standpoint, but something about her just fell flat and felt generic. Probably at least in part because she fell for the other MC just because he's hot and she was supposed to. (But we'll get to that later.) I did appreciate that she was allowed to be weak. She wasn't looked down upon for failing, she was simply encouraged to get back up and fight harder.

I did like Helene. As much as she was on the wrong side, I respected how firmly she was loyal to the side she believed in, how strong she was while still allowing herself to feel (sometimes), and how loyal she was to Elias, as well.

As usual, my favorite characters are side characters (Keenan and Teluman). They were both awesome, and I don't think either of them got the page time they deserved. (But such is usually the case with lovely side characters, so I'm not super surprised/disappointed.)

But this romance, man... This is what really did it in, the main reason I won't be continuing the series. If it weren't for this, I could give book two the benefit of the doubt that it'll fix the issues I saw in this one (with depravity, and Elias taking too long to do stuff, and hopefully the added benefit of sibling time between Laia and Darin, 'cause that would be awesome). But I don't. like. the romance. Laia and Elias suck together. They just do. Their relationship felt totally contrived and shallow, to me. I understand why Elias likes Laia. I don't understand why Laia likes Elias, except that he's hot. He saved her life a few times, yes, but she still sees him as an enemy and there's no reason that should have changed until the bedroom scene (not what it sounds like), which should not have been enough for them to tip over into romance territory. You don't go from seeing someone as an enemy to making out with them in ten minutes. That's not how that works. So her whole side of things just feels shallow. PLUS, both of them have people they have way better chemistry and foundational relationships with. I understand Helene and Elias wouldn't actually work because their beliefs are too mismatched (at least for now), but they still worked better than he and Laia. And Laia and Keenan worked waaaaaaaay better than she and Elias. So... the main romance irks me a lot, and I don't want to read a whole trilogy's worth of forced romance and leaving better love interests on the sidelines. I just don't.

I had fairly high hopes for this book, and it just... wasn't for me, in the end. :P

This book... Oh my gosh... I'm half convinced that Rachel Coker wrote Chasing Jupiter on psychic paper. I relate to this book so much in so many areas. My feelings about this book can be summed up as follows:

I can't believe that when I got this book I started reading and thought it was awful! WHY, Younger Self?! WHY?! This book is now in my top five favorite books. It made me FEEL, okay?! Very few books can do that! The only two other books that have done that (I think) are The Giver by Lois Lowry and Heartless by Marissa Meyer. But anyway...

This book was beautifully written, the main characters were well-developed, the MC (Scarlett)'s struggles and feelings were super relatable (her relationship with her best guy friend, okay? I relate so much!), and Cliff was just the most adorable kiddo ever! He and Cor would get along so well. ^-^

So I guess I'll start with Scarlett's overall life. Her brother is considered odd by everyone around, as is her grandfather, her parents aren't the wealthiest people in the world, and she has a hippie older sister who's quite independent. She has a lot on her shoulders, and she doesn't understand why things are so hard and won't get better. (ME, PEOPLE! I totally relate to that hopelessness!) She also has no friends, because her brother is weird and she sticks up for him.

She becomes friends early on with a boy, Frank, who sees past hers and her brothers' peculiarities, and Frank is seriously the sweetest guy ever. ^-^ Her relationship with him is so relatable, though... Seriously, this relationship is the part of the book that makes me feel like Coker was writing about me. She and Frank ask each other random questions all the time, they joke around... There are some exact quotes that I'll mention, because I was just like "O-O MEEEEEE."

...A smile broke out on his face, slowly at first but then blossoming into a full-out grin. He had a wonderfully handsome face when he smiled, like the difference between a small flame and a blazing fire.

*******

Maybe that's what our friendship was. It was the feeling that we didn't have to think or explain. We could just sit in the darkness and watch the tadpoles just as easily as we could lie out in the heat and breathe in the smell of peaches and gravel, all without saying a word.

There was another one, but now I can't find it. Oh well.

The emotions were beautifully written all around. Anger, love, frustration... Her relationship with Cliff (her brother) was amazing. I wish I were that gracious with my siblings. She gets frustrated with him, too, but for the most part she's gracious with him and is able to effortlessly show him that she loves him.

The book does have its flaws. The biggest one was that I felt like Scarlett's sister, Juli, didn't really have much of a purpose in the book and was really underdeveloped.

Another was that when she develops a crush on Frank, the pastor's wife suggests that she tell Frank. That's mostly just a minor annoyance, but it kind of precedes my next comment...

I was reading over the reviews on here and someone said it was unrealistic for her to be thinking of marrying Frank after just a few months and a crush on him. While I do understand that, to an extend, I also know that my brain works exactly that way. When I have a crush on someone, I tend to think forward to how they'd be as a husband. My brain totally skips over the whole dating/courting aspect of it, because I don't see the point of having a crush on someone if that relationship won't go somewhere in the long run. But that was basically a tangent.

The foreshadowing in the book was also really good. She follows the Checkov's Gun rule quite well, and the Checkov's Gun rule is that if there's a gun on the table in act one it needs to go off in act two. Obviously it doesn't only apply to guns, but that's the basic theory. Rachel Coker did that very well.

Overall I thought this was an excellent book, it made me feel a lot, I read it all in one sitting (it's only 221 pages), and it's a new favorite. Definitely giving it five stars.

(Originally written on Scribes & Archers)