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4.3 AVERAGE
4.3 AVERAGE
Absolutely phenomenal. I didn’t realize Taylor could top the beauty that was the DoSaB trilogy, but she did. Her storytelling skills have only gotten better. I could go on about her lyrical writing and unique plots and characters, and it would all boil down to this: read this book.
Everything about this story is new, and yet not. The plot and worldbuilding are fantastical and exciting products of Taylor’s wild imagination, built on the tried and true story of the young underdog with a dream and a destiny. The best part is how the protagonists resonated with me on a spiritual level. Taylor managed to hit me right in the soul with this one, and I love her for it.
The only grievance I have, which became more clear when I read it again, is that the ages of some of the main characters are a bit awkward given what they get up to.
Everything about this story is new, and yet not. The plot and worldbuilding are fantastical and exciting products of Taylor’s wild imagination, built on the tried and true story of the young underdog with a dream and a destiny. The best part is how the protagonists resonated with me on a spiritual level. Taylor managed to hit me right in the soul with this one, and I love her for it.
The only grievance I have, which became more clear when I read it again, is that the ages of some of the main characters are a bit awkward given what they get up to.
This book was unlike any other YA fantasy I've read. It's very character-driven, a bit slow paced, and does not really utilize much action except vaguely alluding to it. I found it frustrating to dive into and had a hard time connecting to the characters / losing myself in the world. The story is told with a detached narrative voice and had a lot of backstory and set up to trudge through. Eventually I did settle into the character arcs that were developing-- Minya and Sarai, Sarai and Lazlo, the Godslayer, and even Thyon. Overall it was an interesting story that sometimes went a bit heavy handed with its message.
You guys I’m very confused.
I decided to DNF this book at 49% and looked up the summary because I was curious about but didn’t want to keep reading. But the next day I realised I felt like I couldn’t move on and kept wondering how it all resolved. But at the same time I felt a little bored because the story wasn’t moving fast enough for me. So in the end skimmed over a few chapters and kinda finished the book. This explains my exact feelings towards this book
I decided to DNF this book at 49% and looked up the summary because I was curious about but didn’t want to keep reading. But the next day I realised I felt like I couldn’t move on and kept wondering how it all resolved. But at the same time I felt a little bored because the story wasn’t moving fast enough for me. So in the end skimmed over a few chapters and kinda finished the book. This explains my exact feelings towards this book
adventurous
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Such a lovely, dreamy book! Laini Taylor always comes up with totally new, creative and amazing fantasy stories. There's no way you won't enjoy this book.
This might be the strongest opening to a series I’ve ever read. I literally found this by accident and oh my god…. I literally was enthralled. Sarai and Lazlo were both such incredible characters, not to mention the depth of feeling and emotion the author achieved was insane. You felt the rage and grief and despair and elation.
Somehow despite the opening of the book I managed to forget and it devastated me all over again. If there wasn’t a second book I would be grieving right now. I’m afraid to check whether it’s actually out yet because I need it to be so badly.
Genuinely, I think it’s insane that I’ve never heard of this book before…. How. Like one of the most insane incredible fantasy books I’ve ever read. This was like Babel levels of good (although more accessible if that wasn’t the book for you). I feel like I just got knocked over. Going to have to reorder my top five all time list…. And going to need to find this in a bookstore.
I think this book captures every spectrum of emotion well, but it captures grief particularly so. It takes the corded thread of mourning and spools it into fine gossamer strands, weaves a web of it and sticks you in the middle. You’re trapped in it, and yet you don’t fight… like Lazlo in his dreams, you’re caught in the wonder of it. You want to just sit and blink while it hurtles past you.
It’s not really possible to describe how this book feels to read. These quotes at least provide a shadow of an example of the magic that is this story.
“They would say she hadn’t shed blood but wept it. That she was lewd, tonguing her teeth at them, upside down and dying, that she vomited a serpent that turned to smoke when it hit the ground. They would say a flock of moths came, frantic, and tried to lift her away.
“That was true. Only that.”
How easy it is to make monsters of things we don’t understand. To wrap confusion and suffering and agony into rage. It’s a grief of losing compassion.
“He hoped that darkness might soften the loss, but there was just enough moonlight to bathe his window ledge in a soft glow. Its emptiness was stark. The room felt hollow and dead, like a body with its hearts cut out. Breathing wasn’t easy. He dropped onto the edge of his bed. “They’re only books,” he told himself. Just paper and ink.
“Paper, ink, and years.
“Paper, ink, years, and his dream.”
This one is the grief of losing passion - of putting your whole self into something and it being torn away. Its loss, bereavement….
“Five seconds, ten. She screamed her silent scream. She screamed an exodus.
“Streaming forth into the night, the darkness fractured into a hundred fluttering bits like windblown scraps of velvet. A hundred smithereens of darkness, they broke apart and re-formed and siphoned themselves into a little typhoon that swept down toward the rooftops of Weep, whirling and wheeling on soft twilight wings.”
This is the grief of pain, of anger, of rage - the grief of hurt. And you feel it tear through you and splinter you apart.
“Was it mercy or betrayal? Salvation or doom? Maybe it was all of those things flashing like a flipped coin, end over end—mercy betrayal salvation doom. And how would it come down? How would it all end? Heads, and the humans live. Tails, the godspawn die. The outcome had been rigged from the day they were born.”
The grief of hopelessness - the feeling that there isn’t anything you can do, that your actions don’t matter because of things out of your control.
“How anguished they both were, and how still and quiet and determined to suffer alone. From Sarai’s vantage point, she beheld two private pools of suffering so close together they were nearly adjacent—like the connecting rooms with the shut door between them. Why not open the door, and open their arms, and close them again around each other? Did they not understand how, in the strange chemistry of human emotion, his suffering and hers, mingled together, could… countervail each other?”
The grief that’s born alone and is this made manifold by its solitude. The kind that isolates and curls into a ball in the dark corners of your heart. That styles into rot.
“All she’d done was tell the truth. She hadn’t even shown it to him. Knifeshine and spreading blood, and all the small blue bodies. Nothing would induce her to drag that festering memory into this beautiful mind. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Up in the citadel, she sobbed. She could never be free of the fester. Her own mind would always be an open grave.”
The grief of trauma and the memory of the body - the kind that bleeds through your skin like sweat and tears.
“Lazlo slid from Rasalas’s back and stood before her, and if her despair was grim before that surge of joy, how wretched it was after. Her hope could not survive the grief she saw in him. He swayed on his feet. He couldn’t get his breath. His beautiful dreamer’s eyes were like burnt-out holes, and the worst thing was: He wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at the body arched over the gate, dripping blood from the ends of its cinnamon hair, and that was what he reached for. Not her, but it.”
The grief of devastation, of fire, of being left a husk of your former self.
“The sound of it crashed against the screaming and overwhelmed it. It was like color drowning color. The hate was black and the fear was red, and the anguish, it was blue. Not the blue of cornflowers or dragonfly wings or skies, and not of tyranny, either, or murder waiting to happen. It was the color of bruised flesh and storm-dark seas, the bleak and hopeless blue of a dead girl’s eyes. It was suffering, and at the bottom of everything, like dregs in a cup, there was no deeper truth in the soul of Weep than that.”
This book is like sleepwalking through the most captivating results of imagination. It feels like a movie played out on paper. So many books lack the ability to breathe life into the worlds they try to build - this one is teaming with it. For a book so rooted in grief, it is wonderfully, magically, captivatingly alive.
Somehow despite the opening of the book I managed to forget and it devastated me all over again. If there wasn’t a second book I would be grieving right now. I’m afraid to check whether it’s actually out yet because I need it to be so badly.
Genuinely, I think it’s insane that I’ve never heard of this book before…. How. Like one of the most insane incredible fantasy books I’ve ever read. This was like Babel levels of good (although more accessible if that wasn’t the book for you). I feel like I just got knocked over. Going to have to reorder my top five all time list…. And going to need to find this in a bookstore.
I think this book captures every spectrum of emotion well, but it captures grief particularly so. It takes the corded thread of mourning and spools it into fine gossamer strands, weaves a web of it and sticks you in the middle. You’re trapped in it, and yet you don’t fight… like Lazlo in his dreams, you’re caught in the wonder of it. You want to just sit and blink while it hurtles past you.
It’s not really possible to describe how this book feels to read. These quotes at least provide a shadow of an example of the magic that is this story.
“They would say she hadn’t shed blood but wept it. That she was lewd, tonguing her teeth at them, upside down and dying, that she vomited a serpent that turned to smoke when it hit the ground. They would say a flock of moths came, frantic, and tried to lift her away.
“That was true. Only that.”
How easy it is to make monsters of things we don’t understand. To wrap confusion and suffering and agony into rage. It’s a grief of losing compassion.
“He hoped that darkness might soften the loss, but there was just enough moonlight to bathe his window ledge in a soft glow. Its emptiness was stark. The room felt hollow and dead, like a body with its hearts cut out. Breathing wasn’t easy. He dropped onto the edge of his bed. “They’re only books,” he told himself. Just paper and ink.
“Paper, ink, and years.
“Paper, ink, years, and his dream.”
This one is the grief of losing passion - of putting your whole self into something and it being torn away. Its loss, bereavement….
“Five seconds, ten. She screamed her silent scream. She screamed an exodus.
“Streaming forth into the night, the darkness fractured into a hundred fluttering bits like windblown scraps of velvet. A hundred smithereens of darkness, they broke apart and re-formed and siphoned themselves into a little typhoon that swept down toward the rooftops of Weep, whirling and wheeling on soft twilight wings.”
This is the grief of pain, of anger, of rage - the grief of hurt. And you feel it tear through you and splinter you apart.
“Was it mercy or betrayal? Salvation or doom? Maybe it was all of those things flashing like a flipped coin, end over end—mercy betrayal salvation doom. And how would it come down? How would it all end? Heads, and the humans live. Tails, the godspawn die. The outcome had been rigged from the day they were born.”
The grief of hopelessness - the feeling that there isn’t anything you can do, that your actions don’t matter because of things out of your control.
“How anguished they both were, and how still and quiet and determined to suffer alone. From Sarai’s vantage point, she beheld two private pools of suffering so close together they were nearly adjacent—like the connecting rooms with the shut door between them. Why not open the door, and open their arms, and close them again around each other? Did they not understand how, in the strange chemistry of human emotion, his suffering and hers, mingled together, could… countervail each other?”
The grief that’s born alone and is this made manifold by its solitude. The kind that isolates and curls into a ball in the dark corners of your heart. That styles into rot.
“All she’d done was tell the truth. She hadn’t even shown it to him. Knifeshine and spreading blood, and all the small blue bodies. Nothing would induce her to drag that festering memory into this beautiful mind. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Up in the citadel, she sobbed. She could never be free of the fester. Her own mind would always be an open grave.”
The grief of trauma and the memory of the body - the kind that bleeds through your skin like sweat and tears.
“Lazlo slid from Rasalas’s back and stood before her, and if her despair was grim before that surge of joy, how wretched it was after. Her hope could not survive the grief she saw in him. He swayed on his feet. He couldn’t get his breath. His beautiful dreamer’s eyes were like burnt-out holes, and the worst thing was: He wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at the body arched over the gate, dripping blood from the ends of its cinnamon hair, and that was what he reached for. Not her, but it.”
The grief of devastation, of fire, of being left a husk of your former self.
“The sound of it crashed against the screaming and overwhelmed it. It was like color drowning color. The hate was black and the fear was red, and the anguish, it was blue. Not the blue of cornflowers or dragonfly wings or skies, and not of tyranny, either, or murder waiting to happen. It was the color of bruised flesh and storm-dark seas, the bleak and hopeless blue of a dead girl’s eyes. It was suffering, and at the bottom of everything, like dregs in a cup, there was no deeper truth in the soul of Weep than that.”
This book is like sleepwalking through the most captivating results of imagination. It feels like a movie played out on paper. So many books lack the ability to breathe life into the worlds they try to build - this one is teaming with it. For a book so rooted in grief, it is wonderfully, magically, captivatingly alive.
Sometimes prose gets a bit much and the focus on Lazlo and Sarai and their never-ending kisses got a bit tiring, but on the whole I feel like this is what YA can and should be. Inventive, well written, with an actual plot (more or less...) and characters and dialogue that aren't seriously cringe.
Laini Taylor has done it. That was wonderful! I have not been so gripped by a story in a long time. The plot was wonderfully original and beautifully explored. The scenery was exquisite. The characters are so layered that you seem to think you will know what they are to do and be completely surprised by their actions but satisfied with their decisions. BRAVA