DNF @ 64%

I can't believe I'm not finishing this book, but it got to a point where I thought there could only be an hour and a half left of the audiobook, but there were still FIVE WHOLE HOURS and I just couldn't make myself do it.

Reading A Fragile Enchantment was akin to watching paint dry. If I had to choose between listening to the remaining hours of this audiobook or watching paint dry I might genuinely choose the paint. At least the paint wouldn't have an Irish accent some of the time and only on certain words. Paint, thankfully, cannot talk.

Nothing, and I mean NOTHING happened in the book up until the point I ditched it. Niamh and Kit have zero chemistry but they're drawn together (by what, who knows! n o c h e m i s t r y), it's been obvious since the get go who Lovelace is and why, and it's just super duper dull. You'd think at the very least a book about sewing would be a nice, cozy read, but it isn't even that.

I think a major problem in this book is that Saft changes it up between showing not telling, and telling not showing when we all know it should only be the former. It felt a little as though I was too switched on to enjoy the book fully because I figured things out far before Niamh even thought about those things on a base level. It was almost as though when Niamh started putting things together her internal dialogue was dumbing things down for the reader, when I think just about any reader would've pieced things together as they were taking place. Things were only clicking into place in Niamh's mind days or even weeks after the events transpired, and I couldn't suspend my disbelief enough to buy that she didn't figure it out when I did. She came across as too clever to miss these simple things. She's aware of the socio-political upheaval. She should be able to figure out the where, when, and why. So I guess the writing was either lazy or Saft was writing those parts for a younger audience—which makes little sense, because some of the topics and content of this book definitely lean more towards the Upper YA end of the Young Adult genre.

I liked the magic system, but I feel as though it was under-explained in the beginning of the book—that or I was already bored by the time Niamh met the Avaland characters that my mind glossed over their powers being introduced—because all of a sudden people were making plants grow rapidly, and others were clairvoyant (but almost in the same way as Karen in Mean Girls when she says there's a chance that it's already raining when it is in fact definitely raining.)

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