Review: The Sin Eater's Daughter

Title: The Sin Eater's Daugther
Author: Melinda Salisbury
Series: The Sin Eater's Daughter
Volume: 1
Genre: Fantasy
Release Date: Mar. 1, 2015
Goodreads

A Quick Introduction: Twylla is the kingdom's executioner, her poisoned skin killing all but the royal family with a single touch. As Daunen Embodied, she is seen as both a goddess walking among mortals, a sign of the god's blessing on the kingdom and royal line, and an object of fear. She's engaged to marry the prince, poised to become the next queen of a kingdom recovering from a long war, until a new guard makes her question everything she's ever believed to be true.

Out of Ten: 1/10

Review at a Glance: Poorly constructed characters and plot, on top of the romanticizing of some disturbing relationships made this book one that I couldn't enjoy.

Review: I loved the title of this book, and I found the cover intriguing (the colours are lovely). But, unfortunately, that's all I loved. I considered dropping this book several times, but decided to try to push through since I was already 100 pages in before it really started to hit me that I wasn't enjoying it.

The characters were flat. The main character and narrator, Twylla, felt like a concept of a character, rather than a person with believable feelings and motives. Lief was, in a word, terrible. I genuinely wanted to hit him with a shoe whenever he spoke. Merek was pretty terrible too. While the characters bothered me, it was the relationships between the characters that really put me off.

The main focus of the book is a love triangle, where there doesn't seem to be any actual love involved. Its more like a triangle of disrespect and manipulation. I didn't buy the romance. I didn't think anything that happened was particularly romantic. Twylla, while not someone I remotely liked, was constantly being manipulated (at best) by her love interests, and it really got to me. I didn't like that it was portrayed as romantic for her feelings to consistently be utterly ignored, or how she was treated by either of the boys. Overall, how all the relationships in the triangle were portrayed made me very uncomfortable.

My enormous issues with the relationships in this series aside, I had very little interest in the plot. The main focus, as I mentioned was the relationship triangle, leaving a little plot to be mentioned and tacked onto the end, in a way that felt both rushed and poorly constructed.

Overall, I really didn't enjoy this book, and I won't be picking up the next book in the trilogy.