Quicksilver by Callie Hart
no spoilers in this review! feel free to keep reading!
sidenote: hi!! hopefully this gets out to people. i was trying to make video after video on tiktok sharing my experience reading this book, but the minute i would post it, it would get taken down for ‘community guidelines violation’ and yet it wouldn’t tell me why? i found out they were taking my video down through fable, of all apps! anyways, for now, i guess i’ll be back here because my engagement is still fairly good. maybe tiktok will figure itself out, but i won’t bother until then because it’s just making me angry every day and that’s not worth my time.
anyways, onto my review! no tldrs, it’s not my responsibility to cater to strangers’ attention spans. either engage and read with me or don’t engage at all!
i thoroughly enjoyed this book. it was long, but the story was gripping and kept my attention, so i was able to read it fairly quickly! the writing was cringy in some parts, not really sure why there’s an obsession with using genitalia as insults towards people, but at least it didn’t deter my interest because despite the sometimes cringy dialogue and rather dumb wordings of the fmc, the more i read, the more i had to tell myself, ‘she’s a human in this completely fantastical world who’s overly confident in herself and stubborn. of course she’s going to say things and then get herself humbled.’
speaking of the fmc, she was a breath of fresh air for a resurgence of a stubborn main character in the adventurer’s quest cycle for fantasies and had a great character growth throughout the whole book. sure, her choices and wording to make herself overly confident was the whole point because she would, inevitably, redeem herself. that’s what the whole adventurer’s quest cycle is all about! and saeris really was a good main character that did a great job at following the basics of the adventurer’s quest. at first, i did get a little irritated and nearly dnf’d when she started seducing the mmc mainly because the book didn’t make me aware that she was actually stealing his ring until the next chapter. why i was getting irritated was that scene happened rather early in the book, and she was saying how she hated this guy over and over and then just… kind of started seducing him out of nowhere. then she kept saying how she hated this guy but actually wanting him, nowhere saying that she’s actually just trying to steal his ring and run for it. but, it all got cleared up in the next chapter and then i was back on board.
for the male main character, kingfisher, i thought he also did a good job at following his own adventurer’s quest cycle. he was insufferable at the beginning. arrogant, mocking, cocky, aloof. but he soon began to grow on me later on. same with the side character, carrion.
now, for the critique that i’ve been seeing of ‘this had barely any fantasy in it.’ …um, did we read the same book? because i’m someone who actually doesn’t like romance as a genre, i have to be in a mood to read it, yet for the first half of the book, it was very much so world and plot building and helping the reader get an understanding of exactly why she was in this world. so, to the people who say that ‘the first chapter was somewhat fantastical and then it wasn’t for the rest of it,’ please elaborate. because it was very much so fantasy with the plot guiding itself to have this redeeming romance that i actually enjoyed at the last quarter of the book.
anyway, all this to say that i actually really enjoyed this book! and if you want to pick it up and read it, go ahead and do so! i rate it 3.75 ⭐️, which is pretty high for a romance/fantasy book!
catch you with my next book review! (and hopefully people can see this post :P)
