When I initially picked this up, the idea and the plot synopsis caught my attention, a plague is running rampant in this fantasy world, and people are dying at tremendous speeds.

I'm going to be honest here, I started skipping chapters, I got bored, this became a literal chore for me to read. I very quickly lost interest the minute the plot stopped focusing on the plague and started heavily focusing on the world building. Only one other time have I ever felt like i was being burdened by too much world building. It got to the point where so many of the chapters just felt disconnected with the overall story, because they didn't mention the wrack at all.

There was no actual main character, a few came back a few times, but no one was ever around long enough to really build any liking towards. So I started thinking, ahh the main character is suppose to be the plague, this Wrack, but then that took a back seat as well, with all the unnecessary world building. I understand that Bierce was more then liking trying to get me to understand how this was affecting the world, but it just got to much.

Chapter two made zero sense to me, I have no clue how Semaphores work or what they actually look like, it was so confusing. Chapter 14 was the most annoying chapter to read, with all the titles of Illana being stated for paragraphs at a time, and it was done numerous times. There was so many instances where it just felt like there was a stretch for word count being done and it made frustrating. It was pretty much after this chapter that I started skipping pages and chapters.The only chapter that I enjoyed, and I say this lightly, was the chapter with the 3 individuals who were going around gathering names of the dead. It was the only actual dark and emotionally pulling chapter.

Ultimately the reveal of what the Wrack was also very disappointing. It was lackluster and honestly made the journey through the story not worth it for me. It honestly makes me feel less bad about skipping so much in the story.

The idea had so much potential, but so much got lost in over building the world and losing focus on the actual plague. The one super good thing, is that Cover, that its a gorgeous cover! ( )