Overview: The book quartet I’m referring to is The Mirror Visitor series by Christelle Dabos. It’s a unique world filled with a slow-burn romance and a daring protagonist named Ophelia trying to survive in a world of nobles who attempt to murder, torture, and abuse her and everyone she loves. It’s a fantastic series, but I CANNOT recommend it to anyone unless they are ready for heartbreak. Although the books are a great read, the disappointment that leads after was not worth spending the time or money on.
Review and Rating: I loved the first two books; they are 100% worth reading. But as we get into the third book things fall sideways almost like it’s a different story. As much as the plot, world, and character building are superb; the continuation and complexity of the quartet backfires as it confuses the purpose and direction of the book. I would stop at the second book, and the fourth book itself is a mess as the idea of two separate inverted worlds/dimensions was hard to follow.
The most disappointing part about this book is that the slow burn that I put trust, faith, and loyalty into ended with no answers. The ending made me frustrated. I read four books each 400+ pages, about 2,000 pages in total, and over 30 hours of reading and all I arrived at was a poorly written open ending, the feeling of betrayal, and the hate for Christelle Dabos. Unless you feel comfortable being so disasterly disappointed and frustrated I wouldn’t recommend reading this book.
Rating is hard to give here as I love and hate this book series equally, 4 out of 5 stars for what it gave and 0 out of 5 stars for what it didn’t give. Honestly, please read the spoilers, I wish I had.
Spoilers: In the end, the slow-burn romance I was rooting for gets separated, the best couple dies, and one lovely character, Archbaild, becomes mysteriously ill with little time left to live. His character arc is dismissed, not addressed, and left to die. Another character, Elizabeth, who was a good mentor and friend to Ophelia, suddenly becomes a major player in the plot, becoming the hero and regaining her memories. It was random and useless. As well considering the mysterious girl named Victoria who weirdly floated from her body in astral projection. It wasn’t explored and made zero sense to the plot.
I can see that the author was trying to achieve plot twists but at the expense of random side characters. The whole point of plot twists is that they are right in plain sight while also going undetected. It was a terrible ending and I wish I could get justice for all the characters that were purged with seemingly no purpose. All the characters I had grown attached to suddenly were minimized or destroyed; that ultimately is why these books don’t deserve a good rating.
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