I don't know why I was compelled to read this book. Honestly no idea. I was just drawn to it somehow. I don't know. ...but I didn't finish reading it. Let's discuss why!
An amazon summary, "There were two secrets in Varenx House, and Alizhan was one of them.
Alizhan can’t see faces, but she can read minds. Her mysterious ability leaves her unable to touch or be touched without excruciating pain. Rescued from abandonment and raised by the wealthy and beautiful Iriyat ha-Varensi, Alizhan has grown up in isolation, using her gift to steal secrets from Iriyat’s rivals, the ruling class of Laalvur. But Iriyat keeps secrets of her own.
When Alizhan discovers that she isn’t the only one of her kind, and that a deadly plot threatens everyone like her, there’s only one person she can trust.
Ev liked having a secret. None of the other girls in the village had a thief-friend.
Evreyet Umarsad—“Ev” to her parents and her one friend—longs to be the kind of hero she reads about in books. But the rest of the world feels impossibly far away from her life on a farm outside Laalvur. Ev will never lay eyes on the underground city of Adappyr, the stars of the Nightward Coast, or the venomous medusas that glow in the dark depths of the sea.
At least on her weekly trip to the market, Ev gets to see her thief—the strange young woman who slips by her cart and playfully steals a handful of thornfruit. When the thief needs help, Ev doesn’t hesitate. Together, they uncover a conspiracy that draws them all over Laalvur and beyond.
Thornfruit is book one of The Gardener's Hand." AMAZON LINK OF JUSTICE
Alright, so, Ev goes to the market for the first time with her father, and she comes across a girl who looks starving, scared, and desperate. She passes the girl a thornfruit (some kind of spiky fruit thing), but the girl is being chased by guards. She watches as the girl scales a nearly impossible cliff, then leaps off into the water... but Ev doesn't see her surface and wonders what happens to the girl ever since.
Years later, Alizhan is a mind reader who works for Iriyat, one of the powerful houses of the world. The only one whose mind she can't read is Iriyat, and she cannot touch anyone else besides Iriyat without being in terrible pain. Alizhan has a hard time grasping the intricacies of human relationships, and Iriyat sends her off to investigate different people at her large parties.
However, Alizhan is sent to spy on Mar, whom has someone in Iriyat's house who claims they can read minds, and that Iriyat has a secret awful orphanage full of other children who can read minds, and he has to steal a book Iriyat had been reading for too long to prove all his claims are true. Alizhan rushes off to find the thief, only to discover that she can't read his mind. He ends up knocking her out to make his escape.
It spins off into an adventure....that I didn't finish reading.
I got to page 198 out of 341 and called it quits. So, why?
I took a lot of issue with the formatting of the book. The book leaped from the past, to the present, to remembering the past, to other person's past? There was a lot of leaping around, and the different narrators didn't feel different enough from each other, so half the time I forgot whose perspective I was reading from.
They also had two major religions going on throughout the book, which were completely unique to the book, which is fine.... but I had a really hard time figuring out how they were even relevant to the plot...like at all. Honestly, you could have just had a library instead and it would have served the minimal purpose the two different religions did. But I didn't finish it, so maybe they came back into play later in some mysteriously significant way. Which is fine, but as they were presented, it was only breadcrumbs of information in a way that was really hard to connect.
I also was really confused with what was trying to be presented about Ev's gender identity and sexuality. I mean, it was confusing in her narration, but maybe that was intentional to show how confusing that journey can be? But it was also frustrating, because Ev wouldn't even really let herself think about it without really explaining why.
THEN. There was Alizhan. I get that she's perplexed by people and their interactions, emotions, etc... but she almost took on this ethereal quality of sorts. She didn't really feel like a person since she seemed to lack some basic elements of humanity... then she was such an emphasized character, but it's like why. WHY. She was not interesting because I couldn't connect to her at all and she wasn't explained in a way that was understandable either.
....so I gave up.
Happy reading?
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