I’ve been taking a small break from Outlander to focus on some other tasks but I will return. This just happened to be one of the other tasks.

This book has been on my radar for a while. Whenever I’m scrolling through my Facebook reels I always got ads for this book. It seemed interesting enough and I thought the premise was cool. Fated mates who kill each other in every lifetime sounded like it was something that was right up my alley.

Although I was excited about it, I was a little sad cause I wanted to do a story kind of similar to this but not exactly. I know stories like this have been told over and over again and it’s not exactly a new concept but it’s still kinda disheartening when you see a concept you want to do get popular before you have a chance to try it for yourself.

Regardless, I still considered buying the book. Before I clicked pay, I had serious reservations for a moment. Normally I don’t buy books unless I’ve read them and loved them. I didn’t look at any reviews for the book and just went in blind. Normally I would know a little bit about the story due to hearing about it on booktube or Facebook or Twitter but I didn’t even know it had gotten released until one of my booktubers was talking about it.

I was nervous I wouldn’t like it. I feel like sometimes you just have that gut feeling that you’re not going to like a book and that you should listen to yourself so you can save time, money, and heartache.

I enjoyed the first 50 pages out of 737. I bought it on my phone so I’m not sure if the page count is the same all around but it was much longer than I was expecting.

The writing is okay. A bit too flowery. I feel like it tried too hard in certain aspects. Like the poetry sucked, very surface level type things. I went into it thinking it would be a mature read for some reason but it is definitely a YA novel to it’s core. I can’t say I’m in the business to read YA right now but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it. When it’s done good, it’s great, when it’s done like this, it sucks.

Everything felt kind of bland to me. The writing was okay but that’s all it is. It didn’t knock me off my socks or anything. It was just writing that I’ve already seen in a voice I had read a million times before. The events were bland. Everything was just very lackluster. Maybe my expectations were too high.

I thought I would be reading something different than what was advertised. I think maybe I just wasn’t the intended reader.

I only got about 25% through before I decided to call it quits. I feel like the author was trying way too hard to sell me on how fated the two main characters were supposed to be. I feel like I was supposed to think that their love was/is all consuming and there’s this magnetism that draws them together. And like it would’ve felt like that if every other paragraph literally wasn’t just that. I thought that the flashbacks were nice and fit the story very well but I feel like we didn’t spend enough time in the present. Mind you, I only read to 25% so maybe that could change if I read more of the book.

It got to a point where I was like barely looking and just skimming. I was so bored with the dialogue. I think my biggest gripe with this book is that the writing felt too flat. It didn’t excite me at all.

For all that I didn’t like, I did like some aspects. I thought the concept was cool. I like a nice fated mates story when it’s done right. There was some yearning but I didn’t really feel it tbh. I thought that the idea of love leaving the body when you die or the conversation they had about death and grief when they were in Algeria.

I think maybe at some point I’ll try to finish this book, I am curious to know if the twist is what I think it is. I will make an updated post if I ever decide to finish it.

What did you guys think of this book?