Auryn Hadley

From the perspective of a general uf reader, this was pretty bad.
Just a very cheesy self-insert fiction with waaay to much tell and too little show.

From within the reverse harem uf fandom, this was probably pretty good though.
High 3 stars up to 4 stars compared to all the other stuff swirling around in this specific subgenre.

I am a bit sad that just because it's a somewhat specific taste, the expected standards on general writing are so much lower.

I am not willing to give up all my standards of what I expect good writing to be just for a little wish fulfilment like this but that is a taste thing I guess.

With this one, I am particularly annoyed because it wasn't all bad.
Even tho we have an incredible amount of unnecessary tell for things that we have already been shown plenty, other aspects I appreciate in world-building are seamlessly integrated.

There are very few absolutes and a lot of grey areas here.
It becomes clear pretty early on for example that there is no such thing as "the bad guys" based on general groups here and I like that especially because it is not pointed out in the usual in-your-face style. There is a lot of nuance like that that is never underlined which is rather unexpected because in most other books of that sort the world just serves as a stage for the romance and is spotty at best.

This one commits quite a few major crimes in the consistent magic department, among other places, I would usually complain about but it really didn't bother me that much especially because these flaws mainly showed up as minor plot conveniences in the midst of the action.

A surprising amount of thought went into a lot of the world-building and even the pseudo-science explanations require a thorough grip on the topics to be obvious as nonsense (which is really rare, sadly).

What annoyed me most is the general writing style of constantly pointing out nice behaviour in regards to relationships. It's more an acquired taste and intentional within the subgenre afaict but that doesn't excuse it. It's bad writing nonetheless.
Furthermore, telling the reader constantly what to think about the heroine without her actual behaviour not only not reinforcing these claims but contradicting them is really bad form as well.

There are a lot of these newbie writing mistakes you usually see in fanfictions.

Just to be clear, it is a lot easier to point these things out as a reader than actually doing better and I am not claiming I could do better.
That doesn't invalidate criticism that compares the quality with other books though.

Sorry for this rather rambling and unconnected mess. There you can see how good a writer I myself would be.… (más)

Ugh, repetitive drivel. The whole plot could have been resolved with one guy knifing a high priest 2 books ago. Im supposed to believe an entire class of priest is solely devoted to protecting other priests from harrm to the point of sacrificing their own lives but yet when the priests start getting pushed to self harm no one steps up and kills the guy responsible?

Im supposed to buy a god of rage that is capable of affecting his environment enough that several orders of magnitude of power lower he was able to move a giant stone statue cant stomp the guy trying to kill his lover? Or possess someone to again knife the completely unguarded guy responsible.

This book is stupid. Every single thing about this plot is stupid.

I ended up skipping past most of it but I'm pretty sure even the smut was copy-paste from previous books.… (más)