Mandy's Reviews > Daughter of Shadow

If I had to choose just two words to describe this book, I’d go with “disappointing” and “exasperating”. Reading this was an entirely unrewarding exercise in patience. The concept had a lot of potential and none of it materialised.

I’ll start by saying that “book one in a series” is not some kind of free pass or excuse for terrible pacing, iffy plot threads, or other basic issues. Even within a series with an overarching conflict, the individual entries need to have enough substance to stand on their own. They can end in a cliffhanger, sure, but something meaningful still needs to happen in the 300 pages or so before we get there. ESPECIALLY in a series opener, because if you can’t get it together there then I’m not going to bother with books two, three, or four.

Let me start by listing the good things:
- Pet dragon. I love dragons. That’s a free point. You almost can’t ruin it.
- Fun, interesting male characters. I’d have loved to see their POV more.
- Interesting world building and potential conflict.

That’s all the ingredients you need to get my attention to be honest. But that’s a promise upon which I’ll still expect a certain amount of delivery. Which leads me to everything else. Some minor spoilers, inasmuch as there is anything that’s even interesting enough to spoil.

Calla, the FMC, is a 21 year old character who alternates between a decently smart new adult and an incredibly dense 12-year-old. Anything she does in her “21” setting is undermined by the many moments where she flicks the switch to “12” for reasons that will remain a mystery of the universe forever.

Such as, after already having her backside groped by some asshole when he’s sober, STILL allowing his drunk self to walk her home. After dark. Through the woods. Which, just… ugh. Insert your surprised Pikachus here because we all know what happens next.

And what happens next also happens to be a trope I really, really hate with violent passion: (near-)rape being the trigger for special superpowers to unlock. That’s an entire rant on its own I really can’t be bothered with right now, but the summary version is that I take stars out of the final rating.

The unlocking of said superpowers then initiates the Epic Quest. Did I say Epic Quest? Oh. Well. It’s more like a two day trip to a stronghold, with some baddies along the way. And that’s 80% of the book. No especially meaningful revelations or developments, and it takes forever.

Wait, did I say two days? Yes. Two days. That’s how long the journey takes. Long enough that I’ll allow for attraction to exist or romantically stupid decisions to be made, but not anywhere near long enough to believe that a real, significant bond is formed between Calla and one of these guys, much less all three of them. We’re helpfully informed of this development between one conversation and the next. There’s no real tension.

Okay, but surely AFTER the admittedly boring 80% things start to get interesting when they arrive at the stronghold?

Sorry, no. I WISH. It could have been politics or big revelations (or both), but the politics only really happen in the last chapter and I’m calling it politics to be generous. The rest of the stronghold stuff is just “tedious high school drama but the people involved are adult military recruits, promise”. Including Token Mean Girl, who OF COURSE fucks with our FMC through means of petty scheming. I was looking for romantic epic fantasy. I didn’t sign up for this.

By the end of this book nothing meaningful, truly memorable, or even remotely interesting has happened. The FMC manifests powers, three guys take her on a road trip, and they get home in time for teenage drama at supper. And I mean that last part quite literally.

Barebones potential was in the overarching conflict, but we don’t really see any of that in this book in any way that matters. The author’s style was engaging enough, but sadly undermined by an endless supply of punctuation mishaps, grammar mishaps, wrong word mishaps, and even “entire words missing from sentences” mishaps. AND STILL I persevered to give it a chance. Well, I finished the book and I’m done.

This was a diamond in the rough that might have been great with proper polishing. Even minimal polishing might have made it halfway decent. Instead it felt like I got the roughest draft, pre-any kind of proof-reading or editing. A line edit could have fixed the majority of issues with the text. A proper content edit might have addressed the atrocious pacing, because honestly this doesn’t deserve to be a book by itself. It could have fit within the first few chapters of some other book and nothing significant would have been lost. And I definitely wouldn’t have had to suffer through completely superfluous and cringe-inducing sentences like:

*I rub a hand across my dress bodice where it digs into my swelling breasts.*

Just go see a doctor and spare me the internal dialogue. And if it’s not a medical issue, just spare me the Men Writing Women content.

My predictions for the next few books (which I’m not going to bother with):

- The dragon pet will turn out to be Hot Dude #4 eventually because he’s secretly been a shapeshifter all along. Or he was cursed. His sass is just because of his crush on FMC.
- Book 2 will be “high school drama, but supposedly adult people involved”. Still no meaningful development on the overall conflict because There Are Bullies To Deal With.
- Token Mean Girl will either eventually join the Big Bad out of sheer spite and then die horribly in the end as punishment (but only after pissing people off and not in a love2hate kind of way), OR she’ll eventually come around and join the crew because she was really just misunderstood all along. Who am I kidding, she’ll join Big Bad for stupid reasons, because she’s already a Token Mean Girl for asinine reasons.
- The pacing will continue to be sleep-inducing and the end result will be a story that could have been a duology if all the pointless filler was taken out. Maybe a trilogy, if we’d get meaningful interactions and proper time spent on developing the characters and relationships into something that won’t result in whiplash.

Two stars, because it wasn’t a complete dumpster fire, but I won’t be recommending this to anyone. There are tons of other books out there that are fun and engaging, and with better pacing. Some might even by Why Choose, with dragons.