Fully Booked — Episode 16
Reading is something that used to be great, until life got in the way. But it doesn’t have to be like that — you can have a life and love reading, and we’re here to help. Welcome back to Fully Booked, the series for people who don’t know what to read or where to start.
You may have noticed I fell off the bandwagon a little bit with publishing reviews over the last few weeks — and that’s okay! I’m still here, I’m still reading, and it’s important to remember that life gets in the way of things so much of the time. Orientation was a massive undertaking, and to everyone who was involved, thank you for all your hard work! Back to our regularly scheduled book posting:
This week it’s a TikTok flop — not every book you get recommended on the internet is good. In fact, lots of them are astonishingly bad. This book was recommended by multiple people on BookTok, and I did not like it almost as soon as I started reading. The Sin Eater’s Daughter is a princess-in-a-tower type story with our main character having a-touch-that-kills powers, except the book is full of questionable plot choices and extremely limp characters.
The Sin Eater’s Daughter — Melinda Salisbury
STATS
Borrowed from — my library’s E-resources
Pages — 258
Trigger warnings — depictions of coercion/grooming; portrayals of PTSD; body horror around eating; depictions of eating disorders/food horror; dubious consent (falsified identity); arranged marriage; organised religion; religious trauma.
Rating — 2 stars
Twylla is engaged to the crown prince of her land, their marriage arranged since Twylla was found to be the Goddess Embodied, immune to all poisons and endowed with a touch that kills. Twylla’s life has been lonely and isolated, requiring her to become executioner for the kingdom and devotee to the Goddess’ teachings. But all Twylla really wants is to be wanted, but her husband with his immunity to her power refuses to even look at her. When Twylla’s guards are changed, she is assigned a bold young man as her new protector; a man whose bravery is about to tip everything Twylla knows upside down.
The story being told from a single viewpoint of someone who’s essentially trapped in their room for like half of the book does make for a slow moving plot a little. We’re breadcrumbed with bits of context and backstory through Twylla’s memories and opinions of things and people, but altogether her being separate from the action does make this into a book where the plot just happens to her, rather than her affecting it. This theme continues even when she’s released, and it’s just one big long string of Twylla letting other people make decisions for her and being mad about it when they’re decisions she doesn’t like. I hate a passive hero myself, and adding in that Twylla has apparently never stood up to anyone in her entire life, is content to just be a decoration to the plot, and has a stupid name, I did not really find her compelling. Her situation and backstory were cool as hell but tragically her personality was criminally under-developed.
In terms of plot development and reveals, these actually all worked out very neatly and believably. Despite it being a slog to wade through a couple of time skips, and the reader being forced to bear witness to the romance without any plot, the overarching conflict was very well thought out. The scheme made perfect sense, and even with my powers of ADHD plot prediction, I wasn’t able to see where all of the threads were going. In fairness to me, I did pick up on two out of three points, and also smelt a new development coming before it had come to pass, but on the whole I didn’t anticipate exactly how things slotted in to place. To backtrack to the romance a bit, I’m not counting predicting a love triangle as a plot point because that shit was so obvious I spotted it as soon as the new guy made his appearance. Also ‘woodsmoke, leather and lime’ is a new one on the list of things fantasy books say men smell like, but also it sounds like it would make an absolutely excellent candle — Oasis Scents, my favourite candle company, if you’re reading this please follow through, thank you!
The amount of manipulation in this book is honestly off the charts, everyone and their mum (and I do mean that literally) is out here manipulating people left, right, and centre. Adding in a huge scoop of religious disillusionment means that for anyone who grew up Catholic, this fantasy book is probably going to hit a little close to home for you. On the other hand, if you’re a fan Victorian flower language you’re going to love this.
2/5 for being generally interesting and having cool concepts. Points deducted for a lead character/protagonist with no personality, blatant trope abuse, and the criminal underutilisation of those aforementioned really cool concepts.
