A Review: The Scorpion Rules by Erin Bow

“Greta is a duchess and crown princess—and a hostage to peace. This is how the game is played: if you want to rule, you must give one of your children as a hostage. Go to war and your hostage dies.”

I started reading Erin Bow's The Scorpion Rules with such high expectations. Unfortunately, I was severely let down. The idea sounds fantastic, but the book was incredibly boring and I had to force myself to finish it.

What I Liked About It:

• The original premise was promising, and the first part of the book (while being extremely slow) seemed like it could lead to a fantastic story 

What I Didn't Like About It:

• The characters were extremely boring and under-developed. It was difficult to tell any of them apart, and most seemed to have no role in the story whatsoever. Diversity is great, but if the characters don't have a point in the book it's better just to keep them out. None of the characters were likeable either. Greta, the main character, had nothing special about her character. For the entire book her classmates treated her like she was a queen though they had absolutely no reason to. For the life of me, I can't figure out what is supposed to be likable about her character. 
• The love triangle was, simply put, just stupid. First of all, I hate love triangles in novels. I don't see how they add anything to the story, and in this book it was no exception. In fact, this book may have the most useless love triangle ever. The first half of the book sets up one person as Greta's love interest, and then out of nowhere she suddenly realizes she's madly in love with someone else. No hints earlier in the book at this second relationship and no explanation to how Greta fell in love with this person. The development of the entire relationship was just awful. 
• The second half of the book seems like a completely different novel than the first half. Tons of things start to happen that just don't make sense in the world created in the first half of the book. I was very confused throughout the second half and managed to just skim through most of it as I didn't care about it anyway. 
• Finally, like many reviewers half mentioned before me, the insane number of times goats were mentioned throughout the novel was a huge problem for me. By the end of the book, I felt like I knew more about the individual goats than most of the human characters.
  

Overall, the idea was great and this could have been a fantastic novel. Unfortunately, Erin Bow just didn't deliver. The story was incredibly slow, the world-building was awful, the characters were boring and unlikeable, and the plot was extremely confusing in many places. I was shocked when I found that this book was getting a sequel. While I normally go out of my way to get sequels to my books, I can't figure out why one is necessary here and I definitely won't be reading it.

Rating: 2/5 (it's okay)