I get why people don't like it but here are my take aways.

1.) It subverts the heros journey.

2.) The character has to stay in places for long amounts of time to work to move to the next point and that things were not given or explained to him

3.) Even though overall the message is "the real journey are the freinds you meet along the way" he still gets what he was promised and at least he actually went back to the tribe instead of staying back in Spain.

Overall I do think this was meant to be a YA novella and a literary fiction starter book just because there is not a ton of tropes overall.

As far as the writing structure it reads a lot like an epic though it clearly isn't.

If it's a fiction book then I'll make a list of themes on a sheet of paper I use as a bookmark. I don't like marking up my books because then I start to think everything is important and kind of kills the flow of the book.

So don't worry about a page amount at first as some books require more time per page then others.

I started by reading for 15 minutes a day and if I wanted to continue I would.

As far as books you should be reading. Read books that you enjoy. When I was younger I blew through James Patterson books. Which led to me reading Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy. Now I'm reading classics like Dostoyevsky and contemporary works by Murakami and ishiguro

Yeah that's why people hate the last book.

Imprinting generally is when a baby takes on someone as their parent figure. (Ducks are popular for imprinting on humans or other animals).

In the case of twilight it was used as an excuse for a grown man to fall in love with a baby. What's worse is that it is insinuated that they do get together and have children eventually.

Not really I just got on tik tok and looked up.booktok and within 5 minutes I was given 3 different 'spicy books' recommendations. Also tiktok should know that dudes don't read smut.

It's the fantasy that kind of built the tropes. Kind of like Dune with Sci fi.

Have you tried thriftbooks?