Review: Carve the Mark

Carve the Mark by Veronica Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not nearly as good as the Divergent series and a little long, but I didn't hate it.

The sci-fi aspect of this was a surprise to me, and mostly confusing. There's talk of different planets and travelling through space to get to different worlds but otherwise this was firmly fantasy. So it was just a bit of a weird mix and for me it just made the world too big. Hard to include excellent world building when you're biting off too many worlds. Anyhoo.

The space setting led to me being kind of confused about the different races and the scope of their homes. The setting is shared between two races at war but it sounded like there was just a meadow between them? Like I said, I was very confused. I can't even explain it properly because I just didn't quite grasp the scope.

The characters were okay, but nothing particularly new. I've seen this pairing multiple times in YA fiction and these two didn't do anything too unpredictable. I enjoyed their relationship to one another, but at the same time I'm definitely getting bored of YA romance tropes.

As far as the story goes, it seemed simple enough to me that this could have been a self-contained book. But where's the money in that, right? So towards the end it just felt like it was being drawn out and added to purely so that there was the potential for more books in the series. I'm curious, but I don't think I'm invested enough to follow through with a sequel.

I did enjoy the concept of the Fated; how those fates can be ambiguous and whether going against them was an option. Plus the writing was easy enough and the story had enough action that I never got bored with it. So it was still decent enough.

I enjoyed it, but it just wasn't anything new enough to be outstanding. It's only fresh angle was the space setting and as mentioned it was just too much for me to properly get a grasp on it.

Not likely to look for a sequel, but this was still an entertaining read with low expectations. Not quite the redeeming story we were looking for, but still not a bad offering.

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