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3.77 AVERAGE
3.77 AVERAGE
I’m glad I did read this. I enjoyed this very much, and was so immersed and was dying for Theo’s freedom, that is don’t want to put it down, even though I didn’t have a choice!
I really did have a lot of sympathy for Theo as a character, she sacrifices so much for everyone around her, and for her people. She had real emotions, and isn’t the emotionless heroine that is seen in a lot of books I’ve read lately.
I immediately went out and brought the second book as soon as I finished this. I feel like I’m gonna be dying for the arrival of book three!
The MFC was interesting but got on my nerves as the story progressed she kept on trusting people even though she kept saying how people betrayed her trust.
I also had an issue with the never ending supply of her memories as a six year old. It became too much.
After trying to read this book in fall 2021, I finally finished this book on my second attempt three years later. I did not like it. To start, I could never get over the use of the word kaiser. Many of the Kalovaxian's names were Danish, and all of the descriptions of their appearances seemed Nordic. However, Kaiser is a German ruler's title, and I just can't imagine that the use of a German title for a genocidal ruler is unintentional. Obviously, using kaiser for your nordic-coded, genocidal villain king is not like calling him the führer, but I cannot shake that it is too uncomfortably close. I really do not like getting that close to real, historical human tragedy for the sake of a fantasy YA book. Perhaps that is a personal issue on my end, but it is an issue that I could not get over in this book.
A lot of what happens to the main character, Thora/Theo/Theodosia, is very intense. The author never gets too graphic, thankfully, so I do think this book is still appropriate for an older YA audience. Like with the use of the title "kaiser," however, something about the abuse of the main character and the suffering of her people made me deeply uncomfortable within the context of this genre and not in the way I think the author intended. There is just no getting around comparing the conquering and suffering of the main character's people with real life historical events, which makes reading this book as its own entity difficult. Both of the romances felt inappropriate and out of place. I almost wish there was no romance in this book at all; however, given that this is a YA fantasy novel, I doubt there was any way a publisher would have allowed that. I've read other books that dealt with similar themes, some even in the YA fantasy realm, but something about this book's treatment of it all just did not sit right with me. Maybe I'm just getting too old to be reading about a seventeen-year-old girl being frequently, mercilessly beaten and sexually groomed, then still having a hard time with her feelings about two boys.
Outside of those issues, this book is very slow paced and, in my opinion, about 100 pages too long. I was giving it my all just trying to get to the end because I didn't want to leave it unfinished since I was three years deep. Unfortunately, I am just not sure it was worth it. The tension of this book would work so much better if all of these events were happening in fewer pages. The plot doesn't take place over that much time, but it felt like it took forever.
One thing I think this book did well was the complexity of the characters and the relationship between Theo and Cress. Søren, Blaise, Artemisia, Heron, Cress, Elpis, Theo... All of these characters were full of complexities of the status they were born into and what that could mean about their personal actions. Theo's name changes and her grappling about which name represents which facet of herself she needs to be was very interesting. Even Søren and Cress, both of whom were in some ways powerless and made their own choices in others, offered an interesting contrast with the Astrean characters. I loved the Kaiserin as a character, and I think she made a good foil or perhaps more of a possible glimpse into the future for both Theo and Cress. The characters were the one redeeming factor of this book for me.
Overall, I really did not enjoy reading this book. I am going to read the other two because I am a goober and always buy the whole series before I read the first one. Since I paid real currency for them, I feel obligated to actually read them. Then, I am going to sell these at McKay's because I think there is a teenage girl out there who will enjoy reading them more than I did and perhaps she will have more interesting thoughts about them.