“The more you try to tame something wild, the more it thinks about biting you.”
From the plot alone, this book gave off very Hunger Games vibes. Our main character Violet (for a number of reasons you read about in the book) volunteers herself to be bloodsworn into the game known as the Sins. For 500 years, this city has sent people in to face the 7 Deadly Sins and nobody has ever escaped.
Right off the bat though, I was thoroughly confused about what was going on. Every start to a new book, especially in the fantasy genre, takes some time to get used to, but there was a lot going on with very little answers to my many questions. On top of that, trying to understand the language and slang used by the characters took an extra amount of effort that I had not been prepared for.
While most of the book was focused on Violet and the crew she gathered in the games, another big portion of the book showed Violet’s best friend, Jelan, on her own adventure trying to stop a war between rival gangs and powerful people trying to cheat their way to the top. Once I got my bearings on the book, both plots started to make more sense, but I definitely think the book would’ve been stronger focusing on one or the other.
Another point I thought could’ve been made stronger in the book was the budding relationship between our beginning antagonist Jack and main character Violet. They bickered back and forth for the majority of the book, then in the next chapter they seemed to be hopelessly in love with each other. I thought there definitely needed to be more build up between the characters to make their relationship seem more believable.
Now more on the actual Sins from the games; I thought the author Rachel did such a good job using the sins to play a role in each world they traveled too. It was a challenge for myself to try and figure out where they were before the characters did. The only one that gave me a bit of an ick was in Gluttony were our characters were trapped in a cannibalistic land. While I understood the sin, it was still very difficult for me to read and almost made me quit reading the book entirely.
Overall, I gave this book 3 stars. I appreciated the grand scheme of the book and the ending left me wanting more despite my original thought of stopping halfway through it. While I am a book addict, even I found the length of this book intimidating and while some parts were too detailed and not moving the book forward, other parts contained so much information and so many things were happening that I had to read over them several times to make sure I understood what was going on.
I would definitely only recommend this book to people I think could handle it (with some trigger warnings and tabo topics), but overall I am happy I stuck with it and finished the book.
Book Rating: 3/5
Spice Rating: 3/5
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