Reviews tagging 'Cultural appropriation'

Tower of Dawn by Sarah J. Maas

1 review

ksykes's review against another edition

adventurous informative mysterious slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

I wasn’t that excited about this book because I feel like Chaol’s character in recent books has become as boring and limp as a dirty dishrag, and in this book Chaol’s arc was super boring and the romance felt very uninspired and lackluster. Pretty much the only parts I liked were about Nesryn.

This book definitely needed a better editor—a) it didn’t need to be this long, and b) there are sentence fragments, typos, etc. GALORE. I also think this would have been much better published before Empire of Storms. We were left on such an emotional high at the end of that book and I feel like Tower of Dawn has dissipated that. Plus, not knowing what was happening with Aelin would have ratcheted up the tension had Tower of Dawn been published first.

All in all, it was okay—I loved Nesryn’s storyline, but the rest of it was kind of boring. It just wasn’t as fun as the other books in the series, and to be honest, that’s why I’ve always overlooked so many of the issues in Sarah’s books. Will definitely be continuing the series with the final book—I’m too far in now!—but I do hope it’s better edited and the joie de vivre that’s in the other books returns.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Cultural appropriation and Ableism

Initially I felt a little uncomfortable with Sarah’s approach to Chaol’s injury and disability at first but I actually kinda like how she ended it, and was interested to read Brittney’s review [herbookishthings.com/towerofdawn] that talks a bit more about that:

Sarah mentioned she spent a long time reading and researching Ghengis Kahn, and spent a long time in front of the audience describing how he ran his empire. Despite being seen as a ‘villainous’ figure in history, his empire was founded on the acceptance of all religions. She talked a lot about how he valued education and reading and such. I’ve seen people throw the ‘culture appropriation without research’ accusation at Sarah, but she credits Ghengis Kahn in the end of her book, and it was really neat to hear about the time and effort she spent studying him.

[T]he new cultures and characters were such a breath of fresh air. A majority of the book is spent world building and the development of new characters that will play vital roles in the next installment. I can’t speak to the accuracy of how these characters are represented, but I really loved how strong and courageous they are. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but the Southern Continents are lead by the khagan and his royal family. The new princes and princesses are literally SO cool and easily became my favorite characters. There are also ruk riders which I won’t touch too much on, but holy crap, they are going to bring a whole new level of epic to the series.

I was also unsure about her approach to Antica as I feel like Sarah as a history of cultural appropriation but, again, I was surprised at how decently Sarah handled this. Almost all of the characters are POC; I think Chaol and Yrene are the only white people with page time in this book. And there’s also a major side character who is queer, though I think that was handled a little oddly at times.