a missing spark

I wish I could say I enjoyed this more than I actually did. And it's not that I didn't enjoy it, either, but it just felt like it was missing something. What that something is, I also don't quite know. Maybe that's my main qualm with this book overall---it just feels like it has the potential to be something really epic and emotionally sweeping, but falls just a bit short. Maybe it's the character development, which felt to me like it had great momentum at the beginning and then fell a little flat. Or the fact that the voice actors for the audiobook I listened to were just kind of really bad (sorry, but I really need to hear more than one type of voice inflection to believe that you've ever read anything out loud before). It may also be the inevitable game of comparison I played concerning similarities to Throne of Glass. Thanks to the influence of TikTok and the ferocity with which I devoured Maas' series two years ago, a story about a main female character desiring freedom from her oppressive master, discovering she can control a strange, powerful kind of magic, and eventually becoming an assassin of sorts for a slightly corrupt order of magical warriors is going to make me think of Celaena and the literary world in which she exists. I thought there were some great unique side characters, and a lot of promise for the book's world to be expanded in the rest of the series I'm not planning on reading. I also thought Max's backstory and the incorporation of a weapon of mass destruction in the form of a parasite were fascinating parts of this story that set it apart from Throne of Glass. But I still felt like the little momentum going at the beginning dropped off and got convoluted with overlapping political subplots, the introduction of this parasitic monster, and the slow burn romance I wished was just a little less and slow and a little more burn. I may be the slow burn's biggest fan, too, so this is saying something. As I've already decided to not continue with this series, I'll end this review here, quite eager to move on to something that hopefully has the spark I'm looking for in a fantasy series with such an intriguing concept as this one.



Some of my favorite quotes from Daughter of No Worlds:

"Men want power because it makes them feel good. Women want power because it lets us do things."

​"I had spent the night cutting myself up into little pieces for consumption, forcing people to acknowledge me, thrusting my pain into their faces."

"We had carved out these small, intimate spaces for each other in our lives, and by some miracle of human denial, neither of us had thought about what that would inevitably mean. Now, for the first time, I realized the breadth of the gaping absence we would leave in each other."

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