Poison Study

Where to begin here? I finished it, and hence the 3 stars! Maybe I've been spoiled by incredible in depth character development and world building of Marie Rutkowski, Sarah J Maas, Leigh Bardugo, etc., but this story lacked any chemistry mostly because it felt like a sketch. The story bones are good, premise is intriguing, but the narration is so lackluster. I get so easily invested in stories, and honestly I couldn't care less about any of the characters because I didn't know who they were, what made them tick, what were their thoughts, their complexities, their conflicts. Things seemed so black and white. Bad guys were bad, good guys were good. No struggle aside from the main character, who at least had some page space to reflect on her inner demons. The writing was not bad but also not engaging on an emotional level, and it spent so much time telling me how things are rather than letting me come to those conclusions by showing me how they are. “They kissed passionately” vs going through the motion of actually writing a passionate love scene. Telling me the character is “conflicted” rather than discussing and showing me how they process that conflict. A lot of that resulted in me feeling very removed from this world and it's inhabitants. It's a shame because this is exactly the type of story I love to read and it had the makings of an instant hit. Sadly, it accomplished the rare feat of missing the mark for me, so I'll be wrapping up the series with this one.