Author: Sangu Mandanna
Begun: March 4th 2025
Finished: March 5th 2025
Type: Audiobook on Libby
Narrator: Samara MacLaren
Rating: 6/10
Meh. It's fine. More than a little tropy. It's so easy to see, from the beginning, exactly the trajectory of the story. Nothing deviates from that easy-to-predict storyline. It's mostly inoffensive. Has the "right" amount of diversity to tick all the boxes. Siiiiiigh. It's like someone wrote out a formula for what a "successful" book needs and wrote according to that.
Things that might offend some people: The sex. I skipped that bit. The novel is clearly written for preteens/teens, and that's why it's more than a little horrifying to have explicit sex plonked in there. WTH??
Furthermore, remember when I talked about the incredible amounts of F-bombs in The Wolf Den and how I wasn't bothered because it totally fit with the setting of the story? There are a bunch of F-bombs in this book and they do *not* fit in with the story. Each one is completely jarring and unnecessary. It's almost as if the author had a quota she needed to fill and sort of sprinkled them around randomly.
I'd started reading the book but just couldn't handle it and returned it after a couple of chapters. When the audiobook turned up on Libby and I was offered a copy for 7 days (rather than the usual 21), I thought I'd give it another go. I coped by speeding it up to 1.5x.
Ehhhh. It's fine. But I'm glad I only spent 2 days and zero money on it.
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