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beforeviolets's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
TW: blood, violence, decapitation (onscreen), war, mental torture, gun violence, attempted murder, forced drug use (past, offscreen), addiction (past), death, described corpses, emotional abuse, poisoning, colonization, self-harm (a character pierces their own ears), amputation (past, mention), alcohol (mention)
My thoughts on The Hollow Heart are hard to express, because though I enjoyed the book and thought there were a lot of beautiful things about it, I felt that it really disappointed me as a sequel.
Contrary to The Midnight Lie, this book uses multiple POV's, a choice I really enjoyed. Not only did we experience the POV's of our two main characters, we also had a third, omnipotent POV that helped add a mysterious narrative and gave Rutkoski more room to manipulate our understanding of the world,
both past and present. It offered more wiggle room to play around with timeline and connections in a way that I felt was really unique and made the work more godpunk in genre, which I'll never say no to.
But as much as I love Marie Rutkoski's descriptive writing and as much as I adore the characters and the world of this series, the sequel just fell short for me. There was a powerful, heartwrenching, almost Greek Mythology-style tale filled with conversations of heroism and love and mortality built into the framework of the story but seemed to only start about 75% of the way through. To be given such a beautiful tale only in the last handful of pages really just felt like a waste, and by that point, I had been waiting so long for the plot to kick in that the story had lost almost all of the stakes and all of my interest. I really wish those last pages had been stretched out and expanded upon throughout the whole narrative instead of jammed in at the end.
And all the elements and details that I loved so dearly in The Midnight Lie (the romance, the banter, the characterization) were just completely discarded in this book. Part of it made sense for the character arcs but it mostly just made me feel like the heart of the story itself was hollow. The romance was no longer believable, the story was disjointed and anti-climactic, and the characters felt lackluster when they had previously captured my heart.
In the art world, when making comics or graphic novels, there's a rule that states that you should draw the joints of a figure above or below a frame, but never right on the edge of it, so that our brains can subconsciously continue the image offscreen. If you draw the joint right at the edge of the frame, it disrupts the visual flow of the body and causes the viewer's brain to stop the image at the joint. It's jarring and subconsciously difficult to process, and I think that's exactly what Rutkoski did. With the two books, she sliced the plot right in the middle, right at the joint, in a way that disrupts the flow and makes it difficult to be able to connect the two stories.
EDIT: My friend El and I JUST figured out (while writing this review) that this duology is a spin-off of one of Rutkoski's other works. With this knowledge, I'm realizing that the reason that I found so much of this book confusing or wasteful or empty in terms of plot was actually because Rutkoski just spent a large chunk of this book retconning her other series. (This required a lot of recaps and info dumps that seemed useless to wrapping up this duology.) To me, especially considering this series is never mentioned to be connected to the other in terms of marketing or otherwise, that is such an act of disrespect to the story of The Midnight Lie. Sid and Nirrim deserve their own full and complete narrative, not for their story to be coopted as a way to fix the issues in Rutkoski's former work. And now this series is the one to contain glaring issues that need to be fixed since much of it was dedicated to telling another story. Truly such a failure on the author's part.
My thoughts on The Hollow Heart are hard to express, because though I enjoyed the book and thought there were a lot of beautiful things about it, I felt that it really disappointed me as a sequel.
Contrary to The Midnight Lie, this book uses multiple POV's, a choice I really enjoyed. Not only did we experience the POV's of our two main characters, we also had a third, omnipotent POV that helped add a mysterious narrative and gave Rutkoski more room to manipulate our understanding of the world,
both past and present. It offered more wiggle room to play around with timeline and connections in a way that I felt was really unique and made the work more godpunk in genre, which I'll never say no to.
But as much as I love Marie Rutkoski's descriptive writing and as much as I adore the characters and the world of this series, the sequel just fell short for me. There was a powerful, heartwrenching, almost Greek Mythology-style tale filled with conversations of heroism and love and mortality built into the framework of the story but seemed to only start about 75% of the way through. To be given such a beautiful tale only in the last handful of pages really just felt like a waste, and by that point, I had been waiting so long for the plot to kick in that the story had lost almost all of the stakes and all of my interest. I really wish those last pages had been stretched out and expanded upon throughout the whole narrative instead of jammed in at the end.
And all the elements and details that I loved so dearly in The Midnight Lie (the romance, the banter, the characterization) were just completely discarded in this book. Part of it made sense for the character arcs but it mostly just made me feel like the heart of the story itself was hollow. The romance was no longer believable, the story was disjointed and anti-climactic, and the characters felt lackluster when they had previously captured my heart.
In the art world, when making comics or graphic novels, there's a rule that states that you should draw the joints of a figure above or below a frame, but never right on the edge of it, so that our brains can subconsciously continue the image offscreen. If you draw the joint right at the edge of the frame, it disrupts the visual flow of the body and causes the viewer's brain to stop the image at the joint. It's jarring and subconsciously difficult to process, and I think that's exactly what Rutkoski did. With the two books, she sliced the plot right in the middle, right at the joint, in a way that disrupts the flow and makes it difficult to be able to connect the two stories.
EDIT: My friend El and I JUST figured out (while writing this review) that this duology is a spin-off of one of Rutkoski's other works. With this knowledge, I'm realizing that the reason that I found so much of this book confusing or wasteful or empty in terms of plot was actually because Rutkoski just spent a large chunk of this book retconning her other series. (This required a lot of recaps and info dumps that seemed useless to wrapping up this duology.) To me, especially considering this series is never mentioned to be connected to the other in terms of marketing or otherwise, that is such an act of disrespect to the story of The Midnight Lie. Sid and Nirrim deserve their own full and complete narrative, not for their story to be coopted as a way to fix the issues in Rutkoski's former work. And now this series is the one to contain glaring issues that need to be fixed since much of it was dedicated to telling another story. Truly such a failure on the author's part.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood, Violence, Emotional abuse, Gun violence, Torture, Death, and Colonisation
Moderate: Murder, War, and Self harm
Minor: Addiction, Drug abuse, and Drug use
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