Starr ❇✌❇'s Reviews > Projections

I received an ARC from Edelweiss
TW: themes of attempted sexual assault & forced intimacy, gore, accidental misgendering, suicidal ideation
3.5

A book about revenge on an incel-like wizard after being killed by misogynistic violence sounds cool and exciting, but I had a hard time with this book.

I did like the premise, and I was surprised to see that it never went where I expected. This isn't a story that follows tropes or genre expectations, so it stays unpredictable.
I also liked Catherine a lot. She's very individualized, a character who feels like her own person, but but she still feels relatable. She's so much a person, not a character or a force of nature, that she almost feels mundane.

The thing is, the mundanity of Catherine, and the way in which the story follows no expected direction, makes it feel very slow. It's not paced quickly, and there isn't a clear arc being followed, nor one that's plotted in order to keep you invested. It just sort of.... continues.
Honestly, I struggled to stay interested in this book, and having come into this with the expectation of "cool and exciting", I wound up feeling like it was even slower than it was.

The way this story is told is also a little odd- past tense to when Catherine was alive, past tense while Catherine's a ghost, and then present day. While the "present day" section's mysteriousness does get you a little closer to understanding the point of this story, every time we went back to Catherine's life it took me out of the flow of the story- something I actively resented, as it was taking me so much effort to have gotten into the flow in the first place.
It's a shame, too, because Catherine's life isn't uninteresting. I think the way in which these timelines and POVs were put together lacked a flow.

On one hand, I did come away with some opinions and interest in the story, but on the other, I didn't enjoy my reading experience, and I don't know that I'd recommend it.