Of Blood and Aether: Harbingers Book One

2/5 stars “’Darkness is as inevitable as Shadow in life, and I find that to be more comforting than unsettling, for whatever reason.’” I feel like this book really had potential. The magic system was interesting to me, even though it felt a little bit all over the place and left me wondering if there is anything that isn’t possible to learn. The world also could have been interesting. Sadly, this turned out to be dialogue and character description for about 80% of the novel. The world building and the plot barely existed at all. The characters were alright. I felt like I could relate to the FMC a lot of the time. The relationship between the two main characters felt genuine and at an eye level, but progressed very slowly and became pretty boring and repetitive. I cannot say that I didn’t enjoy the spice though (but maybe this is the effect of nothing else happening for about 500 pages). The last 10% of the book were more interesting to me. Finally something happened, but I cannot forgive the MMC for how he handled things in the end. Overall, I feel like this book was pretty weak and I was really disappointed because I heard such good things before reading it. This wasn’t worth it for me.