If a book has "crow" in the title, I read it. It's that simple.
Synopsis: Dymitr—a knight that split his soul and used his spine to make his sword—joins together with Ala—a witch with a curse that will soon take her life—on a quest to track down the legendary witch Baba Jaga. Dymitr, hiding who he really is, wants a chance to meet this epic witch and bribes Ala to help him with a flower, that in the hands of Baba, might heal her.
But they only have one day to do it.
Plot: To start this off, I think I read this at the wrong time. I just finished an INCREDIBLE novella, so going into this was a little bit of a letdown. Especially because I didn't realize it was a novella, until I was almost done. For a book that is this short, it was a surprisingly slow moving plot, and did't have a lot going for it plot-wise either. I think this tried to do way too much background—building the world, the magic, the creatures, etc.—and didn't spend enough time fully fleshing out the actual plot of the book. It was very one dimensional and lacked the intrigue to keep me wanting to pick this up. The synopsis makes this book sound so good, but the interesting pieces of that summary, are not focused on enough in the book for me. I just wanted more, and think this could have done better as a longer novel.
Characters: The shortness of the book really showed when it came to the characters too. There simply was not enough time to get to know them. A book like this needs to play somewhat into mystery and learning the characters slowly, but when you have less than 200 pages to do it, it can be difficult. Because of that, I only felt like I even started to know or care about them a little bit in the last 30 pages, and by that point it was too late.
Maybe listening to this on audio just didn't do it justice...the accents weren't great so.
2/5 stars.
Not sure if I will be picking up Veronica Roth anymore.
Thank you NetGalley for this ARC.
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