Neutral rating for The Foxglove King by Hannah Whitten. Fantasy.
Woman who wields death magic is thrown into court intrigue, has lukewarm love triangle. There was nothing truly bad about this book. But when you start out thinking “oh, I like this” and then by page 250 you’re looking to see how many pages are left (answer: way too many), you know the pacing is wrong. The magic was interesting, and that was what kept me reading – I wanted to know what happened. But the characters kept cycling through the same “attraction / distrust” pattern for 450 pages without any genuine development. To borrow a line from one of my roommates: this book was extremely okay. You can do better.
One moment everything was bright and lurid, and the next she saw only the barest impression of her surroundings, the world cloaked in grayscale as her lungs began to burn, her body tipped toward death. The bloodcoats and Jean-Paul and the living bodies of the crowd were all surrounded in auras of white light. The outline around Horse’s corpse leaked slowly from white to black, life leaving as death took over. Threads of Mortem waved in the air like spider legs, the black corona of an inverted sun.
If you enjoyed this post, please share it!