Mask of Shadows Review

I received a copy of Mask of Shadows through netgalley, but I was really delayed in reading it and so it is already released! This will be spoiler free by the way!

And now here is my honest review of this book!

Summary: Sal is a thief who is determined to one day get revenge on those who abandoned his people to a brutal death by the Shadows. One day he steals a poster advertising the auditions for Opal, one of the queen's personal assassins. Sal must now survive through the deadly auditions as only the last one standing will gain complete access to the nobility.

So the summary that I did is more formal and I realized it sounds like he wants to kill all of the nobility, but it's only a portion of them that he wants to kill. He loves the queen as she was the one to strip their country of magic, ending the ruthless Shadows (creatures who strip people of their flesh).

Now tell me if this sounds like anything to you: competition to become the monarch's assassin and magic has been stripped from the land. Now details are obviously different but two of the main story arcs are pretty much identical to Throne of Glass. Not exactly attractive when you realize this.

One thing I enjoyed about this book was that the main character was gender fluid. I hadn't even realized until pronouns were brought up. It's great seeing a minority in a leading role, but it also didn't feel a hundred percent thought out. Yes it was normalized, but the fact that there were still some discriminatory characters against Sal showed it wasn't fully accepted in their world. However, we don't learn enough about this. The intricacies of identity are something I felt really could have been explored more.

There was also one scene where I think one character confesses to being bi but it was so out of the blue and without any context, I'm still unsure as to what happened because it was never brought up again. It felt like such a last minute thrown in detail that was never expanded upon.

All of the auditioners are referred to be their number, where Sal is 23. They have to wear masks at all times because it's important to keep their identities a secret. This makes sense when you're about to become a super secret assassin, but I think the author fell short here. I couldn't remember anything about the other auditioners as they were constantly referred to by their numbers and had no physical traits except for gender. Thus, the majority of the supporting characters fell flat. The masks were not explained well enough either and all I kept imagining was Scarecrow from Batman Begins:

The romance aspect didn't really work for me. I think it was because of how quickly it was thrown together though. They knew each other for only a few days and I think at one point one of them describes how they had liked the other for such a long time. THEY BARELY KNOW EACH OTHER! I'm a huge fan of the slow-burn because I think it's the most realistic so this might be my preferences getting in the way, but I just couldn't get into it.

Overall, I found this book to be unnecessarily overdramatic and unrealistic with its characters. A good concept perhaps and I do want to see more books with LGBTQ+ main characters, but it was just very weak in its follow through.

2 out of 5 stars!