Book Review: The Antidote

Author: Shelley Sackier

Publisher: Harper Teen

Genre: YA fantasy

My Rating: 1.5/5 stars

Synopsis:

“Magic is not allowed, under any circumstances — even if it could save someone’s life. Instead, there are herbal remedies and traditional techniques that have been painstakingly recorded in lieu of using the mystical arts. Fee knows this, so she keeps her magic a secret.

Except her best friend, Xavi, is deathly ill. He’s also the crown prince. Saving him is important, not only for her, but for the entire kingdom.

Fee’s desperation to save her friend means she can barely contain the magic inside her. And after the tiniest of slips, Fee is thrust into a dark and secretive world that is as alluring as it is dangerous.

If she gives in, it could mean she can save Xavi. But it also means that those who wish to snuff out magic might just snuff her out in the process.”

I’m so disappointed. I was really excited to finally pick up The Antidote after eyeing it on Amazon for MONTHS only to be baffled and confused most the time and ultimately disappointed. I considered putting this book down more times than I can count. . . at this point I question if a two star rating is too high. ( EDITING NOTE: I did decide it was too high and changed it to 1.5)

Why I didn’t like this book:

• It took forever to get into. The first 100 pages were incredibly dull and lacked substance. It took so much effort to push through them without just putting the book down. A large part of this was due to how undeveloped everything is. The characters were as deep as paper, the world never got development, the magic system had no set boundaries, and no culture was established. It was just so confusing?? Mentioning that girls often don’t wear pants in this kingdom doesn’t count as world building??
• The dialogue was incredibly robotic. It felt like the author was trying too hard to create the way these character speak and jumped straight to overdone robotic royal and political nonsense. Everything was so formal it was hard to even understand how the character were friends when they spoke in contractish language to each other.
• Oh, and the relationships pretty much didn’t exist. The romance was flimsy and developed on the idea of lust with nothing to base it on. The characters hadn’t seen each other in ten years, deal with a few days of the messy plot while hardly interacting in a positive way and BAM are suddenly in love? The romantic and platonic relationships weren’t believable and felt sooooo forced. I couldn’t connect or care about a single one of them.
• Relationships can’t exist without characters… and they weren’t really there either. None of the characters got backstories or character development. They all stay the same and were as deep as a piece of paper. Besides “they were childhood best friends” very little was said about their pasts and what was said didn’t show itself. A person is shaped by their experiences and that rule wasn’t follow here; Fee & co were empty puppets instead of characters who lacked well developed dreams, fears, and quirks.
• The plot was a dumpster fire. It bounced between a million ideas and twists that were not developed or well thought out. The fast pacing was messy and changed so often it was hard to grasp. Every other chapter there was an entire new thing or idea going on. An entire new question, or new person framing this person who was trying to frame that person for a murder that never happened? It was SO confusing. On top of that practically every single plot twist was predictable. Sigh.
• Speaking of that plot, it was full of holes. Tons and tons of little holes. Things just didn’t come together the way they should have so many times that I was just confused what stuff could or couldn’t happen. The underdeveloped world and magic system mangled the plot with holes.

I had a lot of hope for this book which is why I’m sad to be here writing such a bad review. It’s a messy story hiding behind a beautiful cover and it hurts as a reader to be this underwhelmed by a book that had potential to be amazing.