I finished this book a few days ago, and man, I don’t even know what to say about it. I have many conflicting feelings. First off, I think I need to mention that I feel like while I generally enjoy fantasy novels when I read them, I wouldn’t say they are my favorite genre. So when I first picked up this book, it didn’t draw me in. There was quite a bit of what I would call world building, and there’s this vague sense of mystery throughout the whole book that infuriated me. I honestly skimmed through quite a bit of the book, because I wanted to know what this mystery was — why is Judah so special? What does Nate know? But overall, it was a bit of a bore. Then *spoiler* the coup happened, which I did not see coming at all, and I felt like that was so unnecessary and confused me even more? I just really couldn’t tell what part of the story was fluff and what part of the story was the actual plot, it felt like the different plot lines moved back and forth between the two. And then the (almost) ending happened and I felt like I was going to be thoroughly ok with the resolution of the story —- until that chapter (epilogue?) that was terrible and made me feel like I wasted my time (because this is a LONG book).

Overall, The Unwilling had a lot of potential, but fell completely flat to me. It felt like there was either too much going on, or not enough, and that my questions were never really answered.