Book: These Twisted Fates by Violet Jackson
Reviewed by Your_bookish_fantasy
Rating: 2/5
Honestly, I'm gutted to say that I genuinely do not understand how this book has any 5 star reviews.
TROPES / TW
fated mates
Orcs and humans
Gambling addiction
Death of a parent (in past)
Grape
Graped while being watched by a group of others
Breeding
Death
And more- check the TW!
First of all, look at the cover - it is NOTHING like the story inside, the cover is a skull, snakes and flowers - the story is about grape and breeding.
There's barely anything at all mentioning fate apart from a tiny character appearance at the end, mentioning the odd cryptic comment. However this character is never explained or given much of a back story or like most things in this book- this sub plot just wasn't wrapped up at all leaving the reader with a ton of confusion and more questions than answers sadly.
it's really poorly written, full of repeats even in the same paragraphs and the most annoying is how the fmc needs to 'do this' to save her little sister or how she daren't look at the shadows and her mum died, how she can not trust the mmc or forgive him and she replays and goes on and on about her grape and it's just exhausting! I understand reliving it, but every other page mentioned it again and again!
The plot itself was simple, but the author made it so bland in places, I skim read soooo much trying to just get past the unnecessary padding around every description, and every internal monologue was dragged out. one character was made out to be a bad guy and then his storyline just ended but he was made out to be a hunt you to the end of the earth man so I was dissapointed with how that trailed off.
we have human soldiers in the story who hunt the orc and then bet on them graping human women and stand around holding guns to their heads watching and waiting for their turn with whatever is left of the women- I get it's dark and I have no problem with this- but again it's sets the soldiers up to be cruel and they're just dissapointing after this moment.
To sum it up it reads like a first draft that you'd send out to see if you have got something, then it goes through the edits, looses a good 100 pages or gets re written and then made into a book. This could have been so good because the idea behind it is wonderful.
Dissapointed. Truly, I dnf at 85% because I just couldn't take anymore, I got through it and got through the tough bits and then sat back and asked myself why am I 'getting through' it when reading is supposed to be fun!