If someone were to pick up Relic and Ruin, they’d be intrigued by the concept of what the author, Wendii McIver was telling them. Relic and Ruin offers a promising supernatural, fantasy romance to the reader, and it most definitely did not deliver. In the world Wendii created, two sides had been at war for thousands of years, the Necromancers and the Reapers.
The story follows the main character, Nyx Lahey, who was born a Necromancer but raised a Reaper. Since she is a Necromancer, she is an outcast to the rest of the people she surrounds herself with. Then there’s the love interest and second main character, Erebus Salem. He’s a dead supernatural soul who has no recollection of who was after being sent to a city in the afterlife called Drewmort, a city where supernaturals went when they had unfinished business when they die.
The story opens with a promising chapter, detailing the origins of Necromancers and Reapers and how they came to be mortal enemies with one another for centuries to come, and this is the only chapter that lived up to what it said it would deliver. As the story progresses, it quickly falls apart. The writing is juvenile, it lacks any sort of character depth, and it falls short of worldbuilding. It felt that it was the start of something good, but then the author gave up and left it half-done, hoping it’d get a pass. Along with that, the story had an issue of telling everything to us, giving the audience useless background information, and to top it all off, there are flashbacks written in italics, possibly being one of the worst writing sins you can make in the middle of your story.