Sebastian

Right from the start, this book didn't quite catch me. My reason for dropping this happens somewhere right at the beginning of the book so I didn't read more than two chapters. I'm not sure I did finish the second chapter.

What did it—or not—for me and Family of Lies, are the following events: Sebastian and some of his siblings drugged their father and their other siblings by putting something in their soup, then went to search for an item in their father's office upstairs. It was mentioned that it wasn't until a few hours later (might have been around 5-7h) that they went back downstairs in the kitchen and, upon seeing one of his siblings with their head in the bowl of soup, Sebastian carefully lifted their head so they wouldn't drown. I don't know how to break it to you, bud, but a few hours passed out with your whole face in soup...

Plus the writing style was really hard to follow, it jumped from one thing to another and it made me so confused about what was going on while being painfully obvious at the same time. I don't even know how it managed to do that.

Chaos. Pure chaos. There was good chaos, there was bad chaos, there was ugly chaos. There were some really great elements to this book (A fantasy world without our society's gender/sexuality barriers! Childhood rivals-to-lovers! Mysteriously “cursed” protagonist! A big, dysfunctional family that fights with and for each other!) Unfortunately, these potentially great pieces of the story were underdeveloped and thrown together very haphazardly. I had fun once I decided to ignore the nonsensical plot, and stopped trying to keep the 3 billion characters separate in my head. Sebastian was a blast.