e_read_books's reviews
292 reviews

I can't come back to this right now, given the accusations against the author.

DNF at 42%

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for providing me an eARC.

I'm so upset because the cover is gorgeous and the premise sounded really interesting.

It's very much trying to fit in the same category as The Starless Sea or Stephanie Garber's works with the whimsy and kind of absurdist jumping from place to place, "just go with it" vibes, but unfortunately it holds none of the same charm.

The first couple of chapters were pretty interesting, a pawn shop that is hidden behind the door to a ramen restaurant and that takes regrets from their clients. Main character Hana is about to step up as manager when her dad retires, but her first morning she finds the shop ransacked and her father missing. The messaging about fate and choices was rubbing me the wrong way, but I thought that was where the character growth was going to come in.

But then the love interest was introduced and the adventure started. The characters show absolutely no depth and their instalove had me gagging. Each scene is Hana taking Kei to a new place via some different method, jumping thrpugh a puddle, through a dream, through a song. They meet some new character that gives them next to no clues and then they're travelling to some other place with the flimsiest connections that Hana seems to be pulling out of her ass! And Kei is all on board for seemingly no reason other than he's in love with Hana (again, I don't know why).

When they make it to a museum with an exhibit of moments of human mistakes and it brings up

the Titanic, a failed assassination of Hitler, and Kokura (the original target of the bomb that hit Nagasaki)

all within a page or two, I gave up. I don't know what the author was trying to do using those examples but to say

referencing the Titanic, that one crewman failing to turn over his keys to the locker where the binoculars were kept and therefore the man replacing him didnt see the iceberg in time; "fifteen seconds cost one thousand five hundred people their lives."

seems irresponsible. The other two anecdotes are true but not something I had ever heard or looked into before, but the one above is disputed in how much it contributed. In any case, boiling these horrific events to one moment or one mistake, even if probably other related moments existed in the museum, is bonkers! I was already struggling through the boring characters and stupid romance but this soured the rest of the book for me.

This is very much a TV pilot dressed up as a novella, and suffers from wonky pacing and an overreliance on dialogue as a result. But there are still some good ideas in here which kept me engaged.

The dynamics of the main duo was pretty enjoyable and I liked the glimpses we got of Neuland's history. I would have preferred to see more of their relationship together rather than introducing Tilda as the newcomer

who by the end of the story ends up prepared to move across the country to become part of their team, even offerring up her services as their almost secretary/administrator. One of the guys even makes a joke about them being her dads, which is just... like, come on.

The antagonist was almost cartoonishly evil, which I don't have a particular problem with in terms of his attitude towards Tilda and the main duo (people like this actually exist, obviously), but his "plan" was overly simplistic and very much followed that TV pilot format.

The monster was a cool concept and I liked that there were some chapters from it's perspective. The chapters were a little too simple and not very horrific for a horror story (a little bit gross I'll admit, which is something at least).

The last chapter from it's perspective even seems to try and garner sympathy for the monster, bizarrely. I think in an attempt to, again like a TV pilot, hint that there are bigger, badder monsters from the Otherworld the team will face as the series continues. We don't even get to see the thing die properly, almost like the budget couldn't stretch that far so we can only imply it, or the Never Found the Body trope, so the same monster can come back later more dangerous than before in a later season twist.

I feel like I'm overly dunking on this, but mostly I feel this was in the wrong format. If I had seen this same story as a TV pilot for a longer running series, I would have enjoyed it for what it was setting up and been intrigued enough to see where the actual story of the season went. But I also would have loved it more as a standardly formatted novel with more time put into the relationship of Ford and Neuland and more description and action into the Pale House and fighting the Devil within it. If/when we get another entry in this series, I'll revisit if I want to continue.

Also, I was quite disappointed to find multiple errors in the text. For it to be so noticeable in just over 100 pages, that's just not on, Titan Books.