Phantasma

Welcome to Phantasma.There are only two rules to the game. Stay alive. And don’t fall in love.

–StoryGraph

MY REVIEW

Welcome to Caraval Phantasma.

Where the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

This was such a blatant ripoff of Caraval for me. It literally took so much from Caraval (and Kingdom of the Wicked) that I couldn’t enjoy it but I did want to see if it would end this the same way as Caraval or Kingdom of the Wicked, and it did.

I don’t really do One Cup reviews often and I usually don’t write on them but this. This book has left me a little displeased.

Older brunette haired sister has to watch out for younger blonde sister.

Younger sister wants to be part of dangerous games and disappears.

Older sister joins in games to find younger sister, there’s no guarantee of survival in these games.

Is assisted by a handsome stranger who may or may not have connections to the game (iykyk with the answer to that). Stranger is more than he seems.

Falling in love along the way which is forbidden there.

Creepy guy who is in the games as well that will not leave her alone.

Except, this has the most inopportune spicy times that I’ve seen in a good long while which were sometimes humorous. And all they went through just to rush the ending and have it all feel pointless for you to have read.

Author may not know what certain words mean. As in she identified part of specific clothing as anatomy on a woman. Not a thing. That’s not a thing on a woman. That’s a place/part on a woman’s piece of clothing. Not part of her body. Also if someone is invisible, you cannot see them, I think she meant *transparent* or intangible, because being invisible doesn’t mean you can walk through walls either.

Ophelia, our older sister, had some great OCD representation which of course got erased by as someone else put it ‘magical d*ck’ and well, they’re not wrong. So that went out the window from my pros list.

The games were so hard to figure out that I’m actually. not sure how the others did it without the help that Ophelia had. I thought maybe the goal was to have them all making deals with the devils for like some upping of soul counts/deals but no, noooope.

If you enjoyed this and are reading this, I am so glad you did, books are not going to be the same for everyone. (And I know I like some objectively *bad* books too lol)

This was 1/5 Cups of coffee from me. I don’t see me reading the next one. It’s focused on the younger sister who goes to Italy and something about a curse….. (stares at Kingdom of the Wicked). Yea. No, I’m good. (To be clear: I like books that honor and draw inspiration from other books but this was just not the book for me.)