A Curse of Breath and Blood

The cover is pleasing, and the description made me want to read this. I almost longed to read it.

The inside is... not good. There is little to no pace in this novel - there's two speeds of go and go faster. There's no worldbuilding, no character building or design (and what we have is one dimensional), and there's little to no context for the story to happen. It almost felt like a Choose your Own Adventure gone wrong. It was extremely hard to follow at times because it seemed like the author wanted to throw everything into this. Characters just randomly and unnaturally spring up; the action scenes literally just -poof- oh it's here and then -poof- gone.

Was there an editor? Or was it a put up for ARC reading and pushed to publish?

I think there was a disconnect between the concept and the writing. I would advise to delay the novel and flesh out the novel, and bring it back to Alpha and Beta readers until this reads like a book verses a first draft.

Author - if you do end up fleshing this out way more, I would try it again and re-rate. Until then, 1 star / 5 stars, DNF @ 18%.

This book has potential but the world building was extremely lacking and every scene was so fast that it was impossible to focus. The last 20% of the book was probably the best part because it felt actually focused for the first time.

I wanted to like the main character but she was all over the place with her feelings. As for the other characters, for as long as the book was, I feel like I learned almost nothing about anyone else.