The merciful crow – Kinda disappointing..

Title: The merciful crow.

Author: Margaret Owen.

Format: Audiobook.

Publisher: Henry Holt.

Page count: 384.

Release day: July 30^th 2019.

Genre: YA, fantasy.

Rating: 2 stars.

What is it about? (Summary from GoodReads)

A future chieftain.

Fie abides by one rule: look after your own. Her Crow caste of undertakers and mercy-killers takes more abuse than coin, but when they’re called to collect royal dead, she’s hoping they’ll find the payout of a lifetime.

A fugitive prince.

When Crown Prince Jasimir turns out to have faked his death, Fie’s ready to cut her losses—and perhaps his throat. But he offers a wager that she can’t refuse: protect him from a ruthless queen, and he’ll protect the Crows when he reigns.

A too-cunning bodyguard.

Hawk warrior Tavin has always put Jas’s life before his, magically assuming the prince’s appearance and shadowing his every step. But what happens when Tavin begins to want something to call his own?

Rating:

Characters: 4/10
Atmosphere: 5/10
Writing: 4/10
Plot: 4/10
Intrigue: 3/10
Logic: 3/10
Enjoyment: 4/10
Average: 3.86 (which means 2 stars!)

My thoughts:

This book sounded so good! I had heard some mixed reviews about this one, but I was still quite excited to pick this one up. Unfortunately this book did not work for me.

The thing with this book is, we got a lot of information in the beginning (info dumping) but I still feel like I missed a lot of information. I’m not sure if things were explained and I just missed it because there was so much at once, or if things were just poorly explained?!

As I said in the beginning there was a lot of information, and I think that is where I got lost. We got introduced to Fie’s whole group of people, and before we have time to figure out who is who, this whole group disappears. But sometimes names will still be mentioned, and I would have no clue who we were talking about. I think we got introduced to way to many unimportant characters.

There is also this magic system, from what I understood of it, it sounded very good. But I didn’t fully understand. Fie is a bone witch, and she can do certain stuff with teeth. But what she could do, where the limits lay and what she had to do with those teeth went beyond me. There are also skin witches, again I don’t know how it worked but they could track people. To me it sounded like bone witches could do anything as long as they had some kind of bone, while skin witches could ‘only’ track people. Which sounded a bit unbalanced to me haha!

Since I was so lost in trying to understand the world I did not care for the characters in the beginning of the book. And then when their story started to develop more and more I just didn’t care. The romance was also a bit cringy. And there were quite some parts were our main characters were talking and I was just constantly rolling my eyes. ‘He is just doing his duty’ ‘which means he has to die for you’ ‘oh’. I don’t know, this character just sounded stupid, and it felt a bit overdone.

I feel like if some of the characters were removed, and the explaining was a bit more dragged out, I would have understood and enjoyed this story way more!

If after this review, you want to read the book, I really recommend reading it physically! Maybe that makes it easier to take in all the information!

Have you read this book? What did you think?