Cold Magic Kate Elliott

Jessica Smith

Where do I even begin?

This book reads like a first draft. What's more, it reads like a NaNoWriMo first draft, with oodles and oodles of pointless description that seem to serve no purpose but to pad the page count. But unlike the NaNoWriMo requirement, this book is really long. According to my phone's Kindle app, it is 580 pages long. There might be 300 pages' worth of content in there. Look, there's nothing wrong with your first draft being overlong and unwieldy with lots of pointless stuff that needs to be cut out, but if the finished product is like this, it's a big problem. Most of my antipathy for this book is probably due to this.

Considering the 580 page length, it feels like not a lot really happens, either. Looking back on it, I guess stuff happened, but the way I remember it is: something happened at 10% in, another thing happened at 42% in... and although reviews on Goodreads had suggested that the book would get better in the second half, it really didn't. It continued to be a slow and plodding story in which I was desperate for something, anything interesting to happen. (view spoiler)[At 54% into the book she did seem to die, which fit my criteria quite admirably, but unfortunately she didn't actually die and kept on narrating from the spirit realm. And then returned back into the "real" realm, where she discovered that she had a brother who was a giant cat. Mmhmm. (hide spoiler)]

What did happen in the second half was narrator Cat randomly crushing on her would-be murderer and general vain and conceited twerp, Andevai. As well, in the last 20% of the book, we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a vast, popular uprising, but not to worry, as if this novel would spend much time contemplating that! Instead, we hear all about Cat's aforementioned sudden inexplicable love for Andevai. I'm assuming that this is what the next two books in the trilogy are going to be about (the sudden inexplicable love that is, I wouldn't hold out any hope it'll be about the uprising) but I don't really intend to find out.

My review might seem unrelentingly negative, but honestly I'm just frustrated that I spent so long reading this book, which was set in the lead-up to a mass uprising with a woman of colour for a protagonist, and it was so boring. How do you even have a beginning like this and make it so boring? How is this even possible?? Like, there's potential here, and it's completely squandered and buried under hundreds of pages of hardly anything ever happening. Ugh. If you'd like me to begrudgingly admit some things that I liked:

1. the demonisation of Camjiata over the whole book - I don't recall any huge block of exposition at once, but he's gradually depicted as some incredibly evil, dangerous guy, who challenged the political order (even though we can see this order is really bad) - before it's revealed that he's a radical who isn't too bad.

2. that Cat is a member of a minority group... this got annoying when it was 755867968 characters commenting on her shiny black hair, but it was good when it involved her explaining how the Romans had demonised her people, for instance. It wasn't a whitewashed vision of alternate-universe nineteenth-century Europe, which I appreciated.

3. the basic story around Cat's parentage, I guess... except IF IT COULD HAVE BEEN GOT THROUGH A BIT FASTER, THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN GREAT.

Yeah.

Cold Magic Kate Elliott

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