Belladonna by Adalyn Grace
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Thank you to the publisher, Little, Brown for Young Readers, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of Belladonna in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
The Gist
I don’t know what to say. I am so done having to deal with this book; I just want to forget about it.
Less than a week ago I made the YouTube book review video for Belladonna, thinking at least that part is out of the way. I thought wrong. It appears my microphone decided to break halfway through the shoot and I had to make the blasted video again two days later.
Now, I’m sitting here having to deal with this written review and I’m getting angrier and grumpier by the minute.
This was the worst story I have read in a while, and I read a lot!
You might have realized by now that this is going to be a very unpopular opinion. Honestly, I have no idea where all these glowing reviews come from. Did we read the same book?
What is going on here?
The Details
I don’t even know where to start with this review, considering I want to spend as little time as possible on it, yet I need to bring my point across.
The protagonist is supposed to be a feisty young woman. Instead she is nothing but a naive girl, who is caught up in some obscure “plot” to best Death.
If you are wondering what’s going on, don’t worry. You are not the only one.
There is this curse, apparently. It’s barely explained, although everything else is repeated add nauseam. This is conveniently brushed to the side, because it does not make any sense in this tangle of convenient and stock-piled mess of plot points.
Death, personified, is nothing more than a creepy old pedophile. Watching his “love interest” grow old enough to finally make a move without seeming too icky. Guess what? It’s still icky.
To make things worse, nothing in this mess of a story appears to have been given at least a little bit of thought. Plot points are thrown against the wall and whatever stuck made it into the story: there is the unlikeable protagonist without any real motivation to beat Death and this random curse; some guy the protagonist has the hots for; some murder mystery that came out of nowhere; and pretty bad writing.
I assume the writing is supposed to mirror that of the classic/Victorian literature era, but this cannot be achieved by throwing a whole bunch of “though” and “upon” into run-sentences. The attempt crashed and burned hard.
Everything is also so on the nose. It got annoying very quickly. I could tell the author thought they were being so clever, but I had things figured out pretty much right away.
The Verdict
Overall, I have to say that Belladonna felt like a scam. It rips off very well-known classic Victorian mystery/Gothic stories and still manages to be a let down.
There is nothing original. The entire thing is badly executed and it contains inappropriate content for the Young Adult genre (pedophilic character).
Don’t waste your money or your time with this one.
