A Winters Promise
by Christelle Dabos
DNF’D around page 200
I have not DNF’d a book in so long, but sadly this will be the one. I wanted so badly to like this book, I had heard so many good things about it and the world building and atmosphere seemed really interesting. However it put me into such a bad reading slump, I could only pick it up and read a couple chapters without wanting to fall asleep.
It was SO SO slow. Like unbearably slow. Absolutely nothing actually interesting happened in the whole 200 pages that I read for. I kept reading and hoping that it would give me something to wrap me in but it never did. It somehow over described every single little thing while also making the descriptions so confusing.
The characters were so bland and boring, especially Ophelia. She is yet another MC that is “different” than everyone else because she wears glasses and likes to read. She is very condescending about it and looks down on everyone around her. Every side character was so black and white with no depth. They were either incredibly mean or incredibly nice and not in between. Even the nice characters are so bland.
The writing is so clunky and hard to read. This book was translated from French, which makes this understandable, but the use of convoluted and extra descriptions made it so hard to digest. I had to literally go back and reread so many pages because I had no idea what anyone was saying.
I am hoping that one day I will be able to go back and pick this book up, because it does seem like a very cool premise and there are so many people that rave over it. For right now though, I want to get myself out of this two week reading slump and I just can't do that with this book.