The City of Sand has an interesting adventure wrapped up in a quest - a desert journey to seek out an ancient city with a queen of mythic proportions. Unfortunately, the delivery of the story was a snooze-fest. Look, I don't know if things literally got lost in translation or whether the form of the story is different than what you would expect in a typical YA lit book, it is super dry to read. It is fully fast-paced, but is so descriptive in it, it feels like an AI is reading out an epic adventure. (I honestly cringe to think about an audiobook like that *shudder* Think Text-to-Speech in Kindle)

Until right at the end, I was hovering at a 3-star rating. The pacing was dreadful but the world-building and the adventure was good enough to somewhat balance it. But then it ends in a very weird way, with barely any conclusion, and a random scene about drinking a lot of water (supposedly to show the end of the journey?) and I was like - I did not go through all this, bear with that awful writing for this! Like, even the chapter endings were weird - they were less of a cliffhanger and more like someone just randomly hit pause while you were streaming a movie. So I don't think it is entirely just an issue of bad translation, because the bare bones of this book seem unstable.

The characters have no development, their relationships with each other is described only through the eyes of the protagonist but it is all tell, no show. Suddenly mid-way through the book, it is revealed that two characters have hated each other all along (for no discernible reason) *looks around confused* and then they are bickering till the end. The dialogues - well, I am chalking that up to translation, because it just comes off as stilted and awkwardly misplaced. I am not even going to comment on the loose threads in this story because if there is a sequel, I am so not reading it.

The bottomline is that, despite what could have been an engaging story, this book was not enjoyable mostly because of the writing.