Review: Gods of Jade and Shadow

Gods of Jade and Shadow
Rating: DNF 
Source: Copy courtesy of the publisher in exchange for an honest review! 

The Jazz Age is in full swing, but Casiopea Tun is too busy cleaning the floors of her wealthy grandfather’s house to listen to any fast tunes. Nevertheless, she dreams of a life far from her dusty small town in southern Mexico. A life she can call her own. 

Yet this new life seems as distant as the stars, until the day she finds a curious wooden box in her grandfather’s room. She opens it—and accidentally frees the spirit of the Mayan god of death, who requests her help in recovering his throne from his treacherous brother. Failure will mean Casiopea’s demise, but success could make her dreams come true.

In the company of the strangely alluring god and armed with her wits, Casiopea begins an adventure that will take her on a cross-country odyssey from the jungles of Yucatán to the bright lights of Mexico City—and deep into the darkness of the Mayan underworld. 

Okay, so you guys may or may not know that I really struggle with DNF-ing books but last month I decided that enough is enough and if I'm not enjoying a book...I'm going to have to DNF it because I don't have the time to force myself to finish books that I'm not loving anymore. Especially as the other month I forced myself through quite a few reads that I ended up giving less than 3 stars. So here we are. I don't think you guys understand just how much I wanted to love this book. It's set in the Jazz Age, it's got Mexican Folklore and a Mayan God of Death...I wanted to love this book, and binge read it and just scream about it. 

Unfortunately, while intrigued, I found my attention wandering as I was reading and ultimately put the book down...and never really picked it back up. I tried, I'd pick it up...read a sentence and then end up putting it back down again. Much like I did with King of Ruin, I wanted to finish this and I tried to make myself but it just wasn't for me, it seems. 

What I did like, from the first 100 pages that I read, was the way the writing painted a vivid picture of Mexico right from the start. There's a lot of historical detail that was quite interesting and of course...we've got the mythology and the tales of the Gods which I can't get enough of. I admired the spark Cassiopeia had despite how she was treated by her family, I thought she was quite brave and refused to let them break her and that's all I really have to say, I'm afraid. 

This book is very simple in its storytelling, there wasn't as much depth as I'd have liked when it came to certain things, particularly the mythology, and sometimes the descriptions were a little sparse. Which is strange, considering the authors tendency to info dump quite easily at the beginning of the chapters when it came to each new city, which was what made it quite hard for me to pick this back up once I'd put it down. I happened to put it down when they'd just arrived in a new city and every time I picked it up and tried to carry on...I just couldn't get interested or invested because of the info dumping. I feel like there was a lot of telling when it came to this book, and not so much showing and I found it quite hard to get attached or invested in the characters which didn't help me when it came to reading this. 

While the premise was fantastic, the execution didn't quite live up to it, at least for me. This wasn't my style of book, and once I'd put it down I just couldn't get back in to it and I have to admit...I did start skimming after about 50 pages because of a lot of unnecessary writing.