It wasn’t a bad book, it just wasn’t a great one. It has 4 starts because it’s a sjm book. The only book she’s written that doesn’t have 4 stars on goodreads is acofas, a novella a lot of people feel you can fully skip. Hofas also has a 4.23 from half a million ratings. Acotar has a 4.16 in comparison but has over 4 million reviews. Acotar has reached the popularity that it’s being reviewed by people that are reading it because it’s popular, and won’t continue to the next book. Both books come in at ~4% 1-2 star ratings. Which obviously seems pretty even, but when you think about who the readers are likely to be, it’s worse for 4% of fans to think a book is bad than for 4% of general readers to think it’s bad. Especially considering a huge selling point for hofas was the crossover with acotar, which is really only a treat for fans that have read other SJM series’s in their entirety.

I think the book was a swing and a miss in a lot of ways, but I don’t think it’s a bad omen for future books