Review: Poison Study by Maria V Snyder

Summary from Goodreads:

Choose: A quick death and hell or slow poison and hell.

About to be executed for murder, Yelena is offered an extraordinary reprieve. She'll eat the best meals, have rooms in the palace and risk assassination by anyone trying to kill the Commander of Ixia.

And so Yelena chooses to become a food taster. But the chief of security, leaving nothing to chance, deliberately feeds her Butterfly's Dust and only by appearing for her daily antidote will she delay an agonizing death from the poison.

As Yelena tries to escape her new dilemma, disasters keep mounting. Rebels plot to seize Ixia and Yelena develops magical powers she can't control. Her life is threatened again and choices must be made. But this time the outcomes aren't so clear.



Review:

The synopsis of Poison Study intrigued me and it was this that made me want to read the book. Poison Study started off really well. The characters were interesting and seemed to have a lot of history that I wanted to know more about. Unfortunately, this didn't happen.

As the title of the book was 'Poison Study' I would have liked a deeper focus on poison and the study of poison. I enjoyed the moments when it was discussed, unfortunately, there weren't that many moments. I wouldn't have carried on reading the book if I hadn't enjoyed it. At first Yelena was a character I wanted to know about.

However, Poison Study was more than 400 pages long and I believe some of the scenes could have been cut out as they added nothing to the story. The plot became unfocussed in the middle and this was a continuing theme.

Also, a criticism of Poison Study is that the characters never seemed to sleep. This may seem like a small thing but it made the story very unrealistic. How was I meant to believe that Yelena couldn't sleep most nights due to bad dreams and could still function very well in the day? Actually, this is true of Valek too.

Valek, Yelena's mentor and later, lover, was a good character. However, I didn't know why he suddenly fell in love with Yelena. It all seemed pretty cliche by the end. I didn't like the fact that they made love in a prison cell either and it was just after Yelena had vomitted too (even if she did wash her mouth once).

Their declaration of love to each other was so quick and for me, unexpected and unrealistic. I don't think they could have realistically fallen in love that quickly. Especially as both Yelena and Valek (especially Valek) were closed off characters.

The secondary characters were very flat. The villains were 2 dimensional. They were all quite easy to work out. The only character that gave me pause for thought was the Commander-who was in actual fact a woman pretending to be a man? And Yelena found out about this and kept it to herself? And Valek, the Commander's bodyguard/foodtaster/adviser doesn't know...? This was all very hard to believe. I wondered what purpose this storyline added to the plot but I really couldn't find any answers in Poison Study as the author remained very vague about this.

Overall, the opening held a lot of potential, however the plot wasn't gripping enough to maintain my attention. I would have liked to learn more about poisons and magic. Synder did not focus on it enough in my opinion. The pace of the story was okay, not too bad. The ending was somewhat average and set itself up for the next in the trilogy. However, there were plot holes and some questions were not answered in Poison Study. I am expecting more of the next books and hopefully they will meet my expectations.

Book Rating: 3/5
Concept: 3/5

Author: Maria V Snyder