A Thousand Heartbeats
⭐️ ⭐️
A Thousand Heartbeats by Kiera Cass
Previously, in my review of The Siren: Is Kiera Cass getting worse as time goes on?
Answer: Yes.
I honestly wanted this book to be good 🙏. I wanted this to be Kiera Cass' return to form after her fumbling the end of The Selection series and missing the mark on The Betrothed series. But Cass' writing has regressed so much that she's lost all intrigue and variety. The world-building that she used to accel at have become overly generic settings that lend nothing to the story. A Thousand Heartbeats could've easily taken place in modern day America, Ancient Rome, or a cyberpunk future, and nothing would've changed 🚫.
Her characters have become uninteresting slabs of gray. The majority of them are just... there. They have no depth of their own, don't feel real, and are often there to just spew dialogue 🗣️. But even the dialogue is cringely unnatural to the point where various scenes are genuinely hard to get through, with the funeral somehow being the most awkward scene in the book. But the general narration has also taken a huge hit, Cass' lexicon seems to have lost all variety and has become so repetitive that certain words lose meaning by the end of the book (there are other ways to convey a characters nervousness than just having them swallow 😰).
All this combined leads to the book just being boring 🥱. It's overly long (Kiera Cass' longest book yet), the world is pointless, the characters are bland while also being bipolar, Annika and Lennox's love for each other doesn't make sense, and they have no chemistry (ironically, the book was actually more interesting before they met). The story itself is actually really solid, but the execution is what failed it.
