Proud of my niece for accomplishing her first novel and having it released by her 18th birthday. If only I'd been able to start that young! Looking forward to seeing what you come up with next!

The cover of this book somewhat reminded me of one of my all time favourite teen dramas, One Tree Hill due to the bridge with a person wearing a hood, however what drew me in was the mystery surrounding the mysterious drowning of caroline and the disappearance of Luis.

Problem is when i started reading this book i ended up not enjoying it as much as i thought i would therefore i had to stop half way through. It could just be me but i certainly couldn't get into it.

I rated my book 5 stars because it's a personal achievement for me. It's my debut novel. River of Sorrows is only book one out of three (yes, it's a trilogy series). I'm currently working on the first draft for the second book.

River of sorrows was a slow burn read for me. I feel like the alternating character chapters added a lot to the book but at times I kept losing track of all the supporting characters. I will say the ending made this book worth reading. The carter family is known for the birthday curse where a family member dies every year on their birthday. Felix is determined to not let this happen to his broth Luis this year and so our story begins. It was overall a good mystery and I liked it.

I honestly don't know how I made it through this. The writing is pretty terrible, the characters are insufferable, and a lot of the plot felt reused. Not my thing.

Thank you for Victory Editing NetGalley Co-op for providing me with the ARC for River of Sorrows by Emily Grace.

I was initially drawn to this book for the beautiful cover art as well as really liking the short book description. This book revolves around Felix Carter who’s family members mysteriously keep drowning in a river on their birthdays. We also have a second POV of a guy called Rigel who is the son of a private investigator hired to uncover the mysteries surrounding these deaths. It sounded like a sinister plot, implying Felix’ family is somehow cursed and I was keen to find out how the plot would develop.

I didn’t expect the story to developed into a somewhat typical who-dun-it, but I genuinely didn’t mind that and I did find the ending quite clever and interesting.

Unfortunately, however, there are a few things that didn’t work for me and which sapped my enjoyment from this book.

First of all I struggled with the dialogue heavy prose. It felt like the book consisted of 95% he-said/she-said which made it really difficult for me to relate to the characters as I barely knew any backstory. I would have really appreciated some more descriptive parts about the scenes the story played/ locations and characters themselves, in as well as finding out more about the characters outside of what they were vocalizing.
Needless to say my favorite part of the book was Rigel’s back story which was mainly written in a descriptive way and missing most of the dialogue, this was actually really enjoyable to read and I wish there would have been more of that.

I wasn’t a big fan of how the characters became super familiar with each other after knowing each other for all but 2 minutes and spilling their whole life stories, and teenager/parent conversations having a distinct immature feeling about them. As an adult myself and I doubt I would bat an eyelid at some of the things the characters were saying at their parents, in the book however, the parents would show major response which I found unrealistic.

Major things were happening in this book and I just couldn’t believe how nonchalant the characters were acting about it. A lot of the major plot developments felt completely inconsequential almost like “oh this happened?” - “oh ok, that’s fine and what do you feel about the weather today?”. The characters seemingly not caring about major events and moving on within a few sentences lead to me feeling like all the excitement was being drained and also not majorly wondering about what was going to happen next.

The pacing felt ok, although some of the romance felt inconsequential and just put in as an afterthought and I think that it if had the right length for what kind of story it wanted to tell.

I am not 100% I am the target audience and can totally see that the next reader might find all my points nagging and obsolete but all in all, there was enough in the book for me for me to keep me sustained till the end. Although I didn’t consider dropping this book or anything I do think that there were some distinct points lacking for me to give it any more stars.

>> Review also posted to Goodreads