I really could not get into in this book. I almost DNF’ed a few times and had to force myself to get through it so I could make a good review with detail. The world building was really bad, I didn’t understand anything about the world or its properties, the magic, the characters, anything really. The writing style was not is not my cup of tea either. The story overall was too hard to follow, had no real world build, it felt like the author expected me to know what was happening having no context or previous knowledge which obviously didn’t happen. This was just a very disappointing read all in all.

Thank you to NetGalley and the Author for access to this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for giving me access to this book in exchange for an honest review.

For full disclosure, I did not finish this book, I read the first few chapters.

My main issue with this book was that the writing style was too hard to follow, it felt like the author was assuming I knew more about the world than I did - explanation of what was happening was minimal and a lot of it didn't make sense to me.

First of all I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.
While in general I'm a huge fan of self-published fiction and am keen to give it a try (after all, you find superb works of art there, like Josiah Bancroft), this one is a miss. Full disclosure - I couldn't finish it, and only read the first few chapters.
It's a story of a world in turmoil and at war, with a major kingdom torn apart due to a succession dispute. The world has some magic in it (though it's not super well explained).
There are many things to dislike here, but I'll start with the main one - the writing is just bad, with events flowing from each other as if they were written by a b-movie script-writer. The events lack credibility - even a fantasy book must have internal consistency and logic. A princess whose role as the heir to a dying king is being challenged cannot simply leave the palace grounds. An uncle who is helping her cannot sneak out when he's accompanied by 100 fighting men !
The less critical topics are around the very weak and partial worldbuilding, and the shallow and banal setting (succession etc).