B. L. Brunnemer

This book tries to get the payoff without the necessary emotional investment.
It seems like I missed the first book in the series which establishes all this emotional vulnerability. You can do this kind of thing in a well-established genre with the worldbuilding. Isekai is a prime example of this. You can save a lot of introduction by just mentioning this one word that tells you the entire setup.
This doesn't work with emotional investment. There is no "be emotionally invested this way into this character" genre. You, as an author, have to earn it by showing us why we should empathize. I need to feel the hurt first to fear it later. (That sounds so masochistic The resolution sounded incredibly melodramatic to me but I am convinced the exact same text could have affected me deeply with the proper setup.
At least this author tried which is more than I can say about most RH.

The instance I just described suffers from the missing setup but the expression of emotions is very exaggerated in general in this book. It very much seems like someone over pronouncing every word to make it easier for a deaf person to read lips. But I am not deaf. I am perfectly capable to read reasonably subtle hints. I don't need these excessive clues to get what's going on.

Well, I guess this is a typical YA thing so it's my fault for picking up a YA book. Do authors believe teens aren't able to understand subtle and complex emotions and therefore need to make it really obvious?
This is generally a really annoying pattern in YA. The authors unintentionally belittling teenagers by writing like they are mentally challenged and emotionally incompetent. Teenagers experience heightened emotions, yes, but that doesn't mean they express them so excessively.
Dear authors, teenagers lack experience, not brain! They are just as intelligent and usually even more so than they will be in 15 years. The brain starts to degrade from your mid-twenties onwards. (Reality check, everyone.) It's like expecting a baby to learn proper speech despite never having heard anything except baby-talk. Don't baby-talk to teenagers, please.

Sadly, that is not the only thing to complain about in this story.
The author obviously wrote down the rules about the world and the magic in it beforehand but she had a lot of trouble keeping straight who knew what when. Sometimes characters act upon information that they haven't learned yet and at other times characters learn things repeatedly each time acting like they had no idea.

At times the author tries so hard to construct a rollercoaster of emotions that she gives up on basic logic which ends up with characters spouting utter nonsense but everyone acts like it's completely reasonable. It follows the pattern: What? Characters need a reason for emotional drama? But the readers want emotional drama. Let's just do the drama. Who cares about reasons anyway.

Honestly, I don't even know anymore if YA this just filled with bad writing or if this kind of bullshit is actually expected from books in the YA genre.

It all felt too forced, too shallow, too YAy I guess. There was way too much shallow and honestly, bad and heavy-handed advice badly hidden in the story like talking about your feelings will make everything better and stuff like that.

I see a pattern emerging here. Every time I write a point of criticism I realize that I basically described a typical YA shortcoming. So I guess that's the verdict. YA Crap.

It wasn't completely horrible but I just didn't enjoy it enough to continue. I dropped at ca. 55%.
Keep in mind that my reviews typically sound way harsher than I mean them to.
I guess if you are less sensitive to the typical YA shortcomings this might be a decent book.

PS: This book has some subtle but uncanny parallels to Four Psychos but I can't put my finger on it. I just wanted to mention this somewhere.… (plus d'informations)