Review: The armored saint by Myke Cole

1.5/5stars 

If I keep this up, I will be known as that girl who only gives books 2 star (or lower) ratings. But what can I do, if I keep picking the wrong books to read??

me: okay, so we have a little girl, probably around 6 years old...
the book: no, no, no Heloise is a woman of 16 winters!
me: are you sure, because she doesn't act much like one...
the book: she's a woman grown of 16!!
me: ok, but ...
the book: she's 16!!
me: .........whatever dude, she's 6 and you know it.

My point is, that having a character repeating their age doesn't actually make them that age. Maybe the author was trying to reassure himself that he knows how to write a teenage female character, while in truth he does not. 

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This was such a miss for me that I don't even want to write this review. I don't think I have one positive thing to say about it? Well, the writing was good. Minus the action sequences, those were a mess. I liked Twitch. And I did enjoy one whole chapter out of the whole book, so yeah. 

​I am just so tired of male authors trying to write books with teenage girls as protagonists, and failing hugely at it. Have you ever actually met a teenage girl in your life? Or do you just follow the "how to create a fantasy novel teenage girl protagonist for dummies" ?

​Because apparently all girls don't ever just want to be girls. They want to be strong and manly, and ride around on horses chopping their enemies heads. They spur their mothers who are soft, and house-wifey and just not as cool as their fathers. Well you know what, you can chop enemies heads in the morning and still tidy up your house in the afternoon. 

​At first I was pleasantly surprised that Heloise (as a fantasy character) still had her father and her mother alive - what a rarity, not an orphan! But then she voiced just how much of a waste of space she thought her mother was, and how can she just sit home and do chores and never want any adventure, and I decided that it would have been better if her mother was dead. Because you know being JUST a mother and a wife is such a disgrace in a fantasy world. 

​For being only 200 pages long this book was so boring, it was astonishing. The beginning seemed promising, for a few pages, till a whole load of random names, professions, religious beliefs and more was dumped on a reader in a span of, oh I don't know 5 pages. The world was trying to be too big, while showing so very little. And it can work in a novella, but it just didn't work in this one. 

​Also, what is up with Heloise's constant rage? It was the driving force of the whole book, but it was never explained. Was she raging because of her "teenage" hormones?? Was she raging because there was a bigger reason inside of her for it? Did she have anger issues? Was she bi-polar? You know if Heloise wasn't so stupid, and thought before she acted at least once, this book could have been so much shorter. Because EVERYTHING in this book happened thanks to Heloise. Because she couldn't control her stupid self. 

It goes like this: Heloise does something stupid - her father protects her. She then does something stupider, her father protects her. She then, yep, does something stupid again (puts the entire village in danger) and look here's her father running to protect her. If she was supposed to portray a brave young woman, well I didn't get that. Bravery is not always running into danger head first, bravery is knowing when to shut up sometimes, a concept very foreign to Heloise.

​And don't get me started on her getting into that armor that was meant for a grown, trained soldier and just kicking ass in it, without having any physical strength, knowledge about how to fight, and training whatsoever. How convenient. 

Besides me hating Heloise as the main character, or as I dubbed her, the idiot - the book didn't do anything for me. I felt no emotion, no connection, no interest - the only good thing about this book was that I finished it.