Review: The Divide Series: War by Magdalene Asante

The Divide Series: War by Magdalene Asante
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was provided an ARC of this book via the author, all opinions are my own. I'm actually embarrased to admit how long this has been sitting on my TBR. The author reached out to me so long ago to read her book and give it a review. Thank you for the review copy and I'm sorry it took me so long.

I really liked the concept of this book. The curse to find your soulmate or die in angonizing pain if you choose your own path was an interesting and unique way of pitting the various kingdoms against one another. Unfortunately there were so many characters to keep track of and the abrupt jumps in time were hard for me to follow at times.

We are thrown right in to the thick of things with the politics of the various kingdoms in the world, but we don't get much detail about any of them. There are two main kingdoms at play in the book but we never really know why they are at odds or why they want to go to war, other than for power and domination. We also don't get much backstory on the characters and their motivations. For me this made the story hard to follow as I didn't understand why things were happening. I also didn't think that the curse made any sense, both of the characters that were cursed were supposed to be dying, but they were fighting and plotting like these amazing generals at peak health.

Overall this was a good debut, the concept is unique but the pieces didn't quite come together. I don't mind when the plot is slowly revealed over the course of a book or series, but it has to make sense when it all comes together. I think more explanation of the key elements, a bit more worldbuilding, and more backstory of the characters would have really been helpful for me at least.

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