luciana's Reviews > Spin the Dawn

2 Angry cunt stars. (Yes, cunt Clem is back and I'm about to burn the house down.)

Instagram | rant on youtube



and non-gender conforming folks, welcome to another episode of "How the hell did this get published?", staring Spin the Dawn and yours truly. Please take a seat, grab yourself a drink, and hold on tight to your grandma’s underwear....because shit is about to get serious.

SYNOPSIS: Some random girl from the north of somewhere (I can’t, for the life of me, tell you where) likes to sew clothes in her dad’s old sewing shop. Apparently, her dad used to be famous and, 20 years later, some random dude--who we never see again--knocks on her doorstep and requires the father’s presence in court to participate in some competition to become the royal tailor. But the dad can’t go because he’s a drunk and the daughter can’t go because she’s not a man, so she disguises herself as her brother and impersonates him in court. She wins the competition and becomes the royal tailor. Now she’ll have to keep the charade of her being a man...and she’ll be under threat of being executed forever!
[spoilers and severe cringe ahead.]



1. So, we need to talk about this trend of having the main character in Asian fantasy having to “crossdress” to survive, but who never questions their gender identity because it’s so outrageous to even think gender identity can be fluid or not cis. I’m not saying that I want every crossdresser to be trans, I just want the perception of one’s gender expression to be discussed in novels.
This trend is just an example of how unoriginal this book is. I’ve read 5 fantasy YA like this already in 2019 and I can’t, for the life of me, differentiate them from one another.

2. The worldbuilding. One word:



It’s non-existent. If my bestfriend hadn’t told me that this was an Asian fantasy, I wouldn’t have known. I can’t say where this book takes place. What kind of government it has. What religions are represented (or invented). How the magic works. Who are the gods. What kind of creature exists. Why are the two sides at war… Nope, I have literally no clue.



3. The characters. I dead-ass caught myself calling Mia by the name Alina for the majority of this book (the love interest being the disgusting Mal obvi). That goes to show how well developed the characters are. Whenever the female character showed a bit of personality she either passed out or needed saving. Seriously, we’re being told that Mia is “so strong and smart”, but all she does is sleep, complain, and gush over some random hobo.



4. The romance.



Just kidding. I have rarely been more turned off in my entire life. It was as if I was reading the script of the worst Lifetime movie ever made. The cringiness of the dialogues broke the levels of the awkwardness of After (the movie). I had chills during some of the dullest and impersonal romantic dialogues I’ve ever read in my life.
Here are some examples:
“You deserve someone who can be with you. That someone isn’t me.”
“Kissing you was wrong. It was a moment of weakness.”

And many more that I can’t even look at without gagging.

In other words, just because you can write one word after the other doesn’t mean that you should write a book. (Maybe I should start to listen to my own advice.)