Of Glitter and Blood
I give up. I refuse to fight with this book any longer because I just can't do it. I feel myself beginning to accumulate more negative feelings toward the book as I go along, and the desire to even focus on the writing is also dwindling. Thus, at 35%, I will say that I respect anyone who managed to get through this messy jungle of rambles because I cannot.
Even up to the 35% that I read I couldn't tell what the world was like and what the personalities of the characters were like either. All I got out of it was that there was some kind of war between the fairies and the gnomes (or was it trolls?) and there were four fairy friends who were special because they remained physically "intact" for a while (although in the end one dies, two are mangled, and only our main character Bethany is intact). Also, said main character tries to establish herself as a badass by swearing a lot and convincing her friends they shouldn't hide or fear the war (or did I get that wrong too?), while at the same time having some kind of mini romance with one of her friends and providing sexual services to a gnome, who is also the son of the king of the gnomes (who was killed).
Um...alright I guess? I'm not sure what the author wanted me to get out of this book, but the above paragraph is basically my reading experience in a nutshell. I was having an ongoing debate about whether Cricket was a boy or girl, since that felt confusing from the writing, and whether the heaps of ashes that were left from fairies were still living or not, considering Bethany mentions she drags around her father's dusk, basically, with his eye or some other mangled body part also in the jar. The world building is almost nonexistent, really, and what is present is thrown out at the reader at a super fast and choppy pace. Some authors at least do a whole flashback or background ramble for their main characters to compensate for the generally weak story overall. Here it was a Survival of the Fittest: Reader's Edition, where I felt like I was fishing for information. I didn't like the characters, and came pretty damn close to hating Bethany, which is definitely not a good sign. The other characters I disliked more for their lack of depth and personality as there wasn't much to go on, really.
I'm not sure what this book was trying to be or what it tried to accomplish. The poor formatting definitely made the reading experience even worse because none of the pictures were visible, and judging from the author's review they were vital to understanding some extra details for the plot line. But even with that aside, the writing should have spoken for itself, should have commanded the reader's attention and tried to engage. I felt frustrated and bored the whole way through, and left with no desire to continue the struggle. Maybe there are people who enjoy this kind of tangled web-like storytelling or are very good at filling in (a lot of) blanks in the story, but this was too much to bear. I give up. Happy fishing to anyone who picks this up after me, and I hope you have better luck and enjoy it more than I did.
