Sasha's Reviews > Five Broken Blades

Stock characters, mediocre world building, too much romance, instalove, and a predictable plot. Rather derivative fantasy with writing full of clichés. Pretty obviously heavily influenced by Six of Crows, but it's the dollar store variety.

Example gripe: Sora is a poison maiden, but so little information about what that actually means is included. We find out that Sora went to a school where she was forced to ingest poisons, and once she’d survived them she could (presumably) use them—but it doesn’t go into the mechanics of it. It sounds like mithridatism, so does she have to ingest the poisons regularly in order to not lose her immunity? Considering her “jobs” are months apart, she can’t maintain her immunity purely from them, so either she just magically doesn’t need to maintain it or it’s not described how she continues being able to withstand the poisons. It feels very much like the author just didn’t bother to think through how it worked, and that brand of lazy world building is consistent throughout.