This book started out with some of the best humor and worldbuilding I read in any book this year, and I was so excited by the premise. Basically, curse-management is a bureaucratic level of hell and a nepotistic loser of a demon is charged with revitalizing an old family curse that seems to have run its course, or face destruction. After the first couple of chapters, I was so pumped to keep reading... but then when the book turned from the demon to the family that he's supposed to pair up with on a buddy-journey type story, things just sort of fell apart. Other than a few brief glimpses at the humor that had started the book, it was largely missing (or fell flat) after the beginning, and the family of characters were all really dull and not a good foil for the demon at all.

Overall, it had the feeling of a book where the author had a really great idea for a premise... and that was about it. The actual execution never lived up to the setup, and the author couldn't maintain the promise of the book that he laid out in the early chapters.

This will probably go down as one of my most disappointing reads of 2024, if only because it was a book I knew nothing about, I thought for about the first fifty pages or so that I had stumbled across an absolute gem... and then I realized it was a pretty mediocre book all said and done.

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Created Jan 18, 2025 at 7:47pm • Submit your own review...