Review: Poison Study - Maria V. Snyder



This is the first book in what appears to be a trilogy. You can never really tell these days. I picked it because I had heard good things about it on Booktube, and it was available through my library. I got the entire trilogy, but I don’t think I will be finishing it as once again I was quite disappointed. 

The book is about a young woman who is set to be executed for murder, but when she is finally taken from the dungeon, she is given a choice; she can go to the noose or she can become the Commander’s new food taster. She picks becoming the food taster and the story unravels from there. 

She seems to have a whole bunch of enemies and people who are out to hurt her and the action is pretty much constant throughout the book with at least one person trying to kill her at all times. Despite all the action and intrigue I found myself completely uninterested in Yelena’s fate. I almost gave up reading the book about 80 pages in, because I just didn’t care about anyone. I decided to finish though, hoping I would muster some feeling towards the end. But I didn’t! And I won’t be finishing the series. 

As for the characters they were okay. I found Yelena hard to follow sometimes. She would be sassy and shy in turn and I can never understand people like that. How can you be so sassy one minute and then shrinkingly shy the next with the same people? As for the love interest it was pretty obvious. A classic hate to love relationship and it was just a matter of time for it to unfold, which did not really make for interesting reading. There were a lot of side characters and most of them were well crafted. However, I did struggle to understand Irys. One minute she wanted to kill Yelena and the next she was content to wait for her to figure stuff out. I never really understood why she had the change of heart. 

I think this book was okay. Objectively it had a lot of action, good characters and a romantic plot-line, although this was very predictable. I can’t really figure out why I didn’t care about this book. 


I gave it 2 stars out of 5 on Goodreads. 

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