The Immortal City by Amy Kuivalainen

Okay team. This is where it gets hard for me. I feel as if I’ve read nothing but wonderful books this year. But I promise to be honest in my reviews always, and this one… fell flat.

The Immortal City had nearly everything that I should want in a story. The Atlantean Legend. Magic. A too involved scholar. Grizzly murders. Venice. It has all the right elements, and it started off well.

I think many of my issues come from the fact that the instalove overshadowed what could have been an amazing book. And the hard part is that they didn’t even rush into it, but it still felt rushed.

There were so many elements, that it almost felt like whiplash, thought they were well done. It just was too much for one novel, without adding another 100 pages. Truly I wish that this had been stretched out over several books, which it might yet be, instead of all in this one book.

Additionally, I love multiple POV books, and I felt myself getting slightly irritated with how they were handled. One of the first POVs that we are introduced to completely falls away, and this promising character loses all realistic growth that I’d been expecting. In reality I would have liked a bit more character growth from the majority of the cast, who were interesting and varied, but other than our main leads, they seemed to not have the depth needed to make them feel truly real.

This isn’t to say that Kuivalainen isn’t a good writer, because she is. Her world building was good, her voice is strong. I just believe that this promising story could have done with another round of edits to make it shine like it should.

I still enjoyed the story, and will be happy to give the next book a chance. This was a solid 3 Stars from me, for the promising story that needed a bit more to make me love it.

Thanks to Amy Kuivalainen, NetGalley, and BHC Press who gave me this advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review.

You can find The Immortal City here at Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores!

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