Carve The Mark by Veronica Roth – Spoiler Free Review – DNF

Title: Carve the Mark
Author: Veronica Roth
Series Name: Carve the Mark
Genre: YA Fantasy Science Fiction
Publication Date: January 17th, 2017
Pages: 468 (Hardcover)
Publishers: HarperCollins
Rating:

In a galaxy powered by the current, everyone has a gift.

Cyra is the sister of the brutal tyrant who rules the Shotet people. Cyra’s currentgift gives her pain and power — something her brother exploits, using her to torture his enemies. But Cyra is much more than just a blade in her brother’s hand: she is resilient, quick on her feet, and smarter than he knows.

Akos is the son of a farmer and an oracle from the frozen nation-planet of Thuvhe. Protected by his unusual currentgift, Akos is generous in spirit, and his loyalty to his family is limitless. Once Akos and his brother are captured by enemy Shotet soldiers, Akos is desperate to get this brother out alive — no matter what the cost.
The Akos is thrust into Cyra’s world, and the enmity between their countries and families seems insurmountable. Will they help each other to survive, or will they destroy one another?

Carve the Mark is Veronica Roth’s stunning portrayal of the power of friendship — and love — in a galaxy filled with unexpected gifts.

*Images is from Goodreads*

*Thank you to HarperCollins Publishers Australia for providing me with a eGalley of this book in return for a honest review*

I Did not finish this book at 54% so this review will be purely a review of the first half of the book and as to why I did not finish this book.

I don’t really get this cover. It’s not very appealing and it also just looks like cuts in something and as far as I can tell the ‘carve the mark’ refers to when Akos is carving the marks into Cyra’s arm for the kill she made… So I don’t really get the point of the cuts made into whatever that is on the cover and what I’m assuming is meant to look like gold blood running out of them.. It’s just a little odd.

So I loved the Divergent series, it is really good and written very well. This book wasn’t written bad, but the pacing was really bad! Everything is dragged out so much and there just isn’t much going on but a lot of writing about that nothing. This was one of the reason I stopped reading.. The pacing just makes it so hard to read. Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy books with slow pacing some time but this was just too much and that joined with the plot itself was just not worth continuing.

Another reason this book really annoyed me was the names of characters, things and places. Most of them are sooo hard to pronounce! As I went along I started highlighting on the Kindle App every time I couldn’t pronounce a name. There was 15 in the first half of the book.. I don’t mind 1 or 2 names that I can’t pronounce because you can just look at them and move on with the reading, but because there was sooo many of them it was hard to keep track of who everyone is because I couldn’t keep track of the names. This meant that half the time I was confused and trying to figure out who everyone was. There is a glossary in the back, so why couldn’t a pronunciation guide be thrown in too…

Here is some of the examples of some of the names: Aoseh, Eijeh, Thuvhe, Ylira, Zetsyvis, zivatahak, etc.

Honestly the plot is just kinda eh. I don’t even know really what is going on and I also don’t really think anything really has happened so far except a certain two people being kidnapped… and what the 2 of them are doing atm with the people who kidnapped them.. Besides that I feel like nothing else has really happened.

I feel no connection to any of the characters at all. This book is done in Multi POV, following Cyra and Akos. Besides that the name is written at the start of the chapter it is hard to tell the difference between each POV. When Multi POV is done well you can tell by the writing which character is which, but this book there was no difference in writing between the 2 main characters and if I got distracted by something in real life I would have to go back and check who’s POV that chapter was because that was the only way to tell.

The world itself is interesting and if everything else was done well then this could have been a really good book. But as it stands this isn’t a book I’m going to continue. I was at a point that I was forcing myself to read a bit of it and then falling asleep a couple chapters in. I was getting nowhere quick with this book.

So overall the pacing is bad, the names are so hard to pronounce, the plot so far is just dull and the Multi POV isn’t done well. This is not a good representation of Veronica Roths writing! Go read Divergent!!

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