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3.81 AVERAGE
3.81 AVERAGE
Entrancing
Beautifully crafted world building, my main criticism is that it's fairly inconvenient to constantly check the glossary for information on things as simple as clothing. Narration styles could take some getting used to for those who prefer a more linear narrative with more reliable narrating. Can't wait for the next book!
Beautifully crafted world building, my main criticism is that it's fairly inconvenient to constantly check the glossary for information on things as simple as clothing. Narration styles could take some getting used to for those who prefer a more linear narrative with more reliable narrating. Can't wait for the next book!
adventurous
emotional
funny
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
High 4 star. A very well put together story, with interesting world building, and an author who always wants to keep you guessing. I look forward to further books. I just wish the mass market copies were still available...
I read a LOT of epic fantasy, and when I say The Ruin of Kings is one of the best I’ve ever read, I mean it. Where to begin with reviewing this amazing novel?? I suppose I should start with the writing style, because straight off the bat, that was what intrigued me most of all. This story is told in both third person and first person POV, and the majority of it is a conversation between a jailer (Talon) and her prisoner (Kihrin). The tossing back of POV’s was a relishing reading experience, and I found that reading Kihrin’s story in first person then having the next chapter in Talon’s third person was quite interesting—as well as seamlessly done.
The characters in this novel were also astounding. How can begin to surmise my love for Kihrin and Teraeth and Tyentso and Thurvishar and Galen and the oh-so-many others who owned my heart from the minute they walked onto the page. Lyons fleshes out her character perfectly, and they’re each such complicated beings with clear motives and flaws. One of my favourite parts of this book was Kihrin starting to challenge toxic masculinity and internalised homophobia in his life, and wondering about what a healthy, positive relationship is. Kihrin is a main character you can’t not love, and I loved exploring his character throughout this story.
Now, the plot. The plot was just phenomenal. Tied in with truly astounding worldbuilding (seriously, the worldbuilding in this novel is AMAZING), you get a storyline that has you on the edge of your seat. This is made all the more interesting when you have Talon and Kihrin both telling different parts of the same story, and wondering just how they’ll intersect together. The plot never moved too fast or too slow for me, and while understanding some of the intricate parts of this world took some time, the end result paid off.
All in all, this book was one of my favourite reads of 2020 (it took me a while to gather my thoughts and get my head out of The Name of All Things and The Memory of Souls to write this review) and you should seriously, seriously pick it up.
The characters in this novel were also astounding. How can begin to surmise my love for Kihrin and Teraeth and Tyentso and Thurvishar and Galen and the oh-so-many others who owned my heart from the minute they walked onto the page. Lyons fleshes out her character perfectly, and they’re each such complicated beings with clear motives and flaws. One of my favourite parts of this book was Kihrin starting to challenge toxic masculinity and internalised homophobia in his life, and wondering about what a healthy, positive relationship is. Kihrin is a main character you can’t not love, and I loved exploring his character throughout this story.
Now, the plot. The plot was just phenomenal. Tied in with truly astounding worldbuilding (seriously, the worldbuilding in this novel is AMAZING), you get a storyline that has you on the edge of your seat. This is made all the more interesting when you have Talon and Kihrin both telling different parts of the same story, and wondering just how they’ll intersect together. The plot never moved too fast or too slow for me, and while understanding some of the intricate parts of this world took some time, the end result paid off.
All in all, this book was one of my favourite reads of 2020 (it took me a while to gather my thoughts and get my head out of The Name of All Things and The Memory of Souls to write this review) and you should seriously, seriously pick it up.
4 1/2 stars. This is a very good start to a series. It's obviously not meant to stand alone, but does reach a reasonable conclusion at a decent point to wait for the next installment. The characters are a widely varied lot, at least some of whom are likeable and relatable, and some of whom are despicable and odious, and some are somewhere in between. The world is interesting and well-detailed so far and the quirky footnotes help fill in a lot of background if one choses to read them all. I look forward to reading more in the series.
Awesome! Truly epic and very original. If you liked Nevernight, check this out.
adventurous
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I bring judgement and sorrow. There will be hints and some spoilers from events in the next few books of the series in this review.
First of all, I wanted, I sooo wanted to love this series. I am weak to the icky vibes these books emit. They’re like molasses cookies to me. When I first found this series I was so excited to read them that I bought the first four books. And then read the first one in, like, a week. There was some shit in there, I was honest with myself in that. But there are four more books. All of the bullshit could be redeemed in four books. Overwhelmed with all the events and emotions I had read and experienced from reading the first book, I took a break. Once my mental stability had returned, I dove into the second book. And hated what I was seeing. So I took another break. Then dove into the third. I was shocked. I was aghast. I flipped through it, skimming as fast as I could. Oh no, I jumped into the fourth, OH NO! I come to you, dear reader, exhausted yet filled with rage.
Lyons' writing is confusing (read deceitful). She is good at writing entertainingly and creatively and has interesting story ideas. But she doesn't tell us the story she promises. It's as if the story is just one short chapter away from getting to the good and promised part, but we never get there. Every time I arrived at a revealing and/or climatic scene it was as if someone had chewed it up before I got there. Meaning: the story stopped making sense because instead everything else that feels irrelevant got dumped into the scenes. Random as fuck characters would come along, weird magical shit from out of nowhere would join to explain the happenings in the most confusing way possible. Mind you, these characters or magical things were often not foreshadowed earlier in the story. These scenes were often the moments these persons or rituals were INTRODUCED. And if they had been earlier introduced they had almost nothing that was plot relevant leading back to them except another character with random stores of information. And NEVER did these random characters and situations tie into each other in any logical way! Patient reader, this happened all the time.
Narratively, I have two problems with the Chorus of Dragons series. Starting with the lighter of the two, what is with this magic system? Maybe it'd be more accurate to say systems? I love a good mind fuck but Lyons takes it to an extreme I didn't know was possible. She has wacky (in my opinion, stupid) ideas such as : putting the majority of the story arch inside a villain’s brain, doing soul and body switches, jumping into the afterlife, and making the most complicated family trees known to fiction. I hate it. Patient reader, I don’t hate creative story ideas. I hate how meticulous and detailed each of these plot devices and choices are. Oh and, Lyons starts every book with the characters rehashing what happened, instead of like, just following them through the story. I can only assume she does this so her meta commentary on the events and people fits inside the story HOWEVER sometimes the writing is flowery writing but according to the beginning of the chapters these are the exact words the characters are using while telling the events to someone else. I hate it! This is a me thing, I know that. I am bad a suspending my disbelief when it comes to these types of things (can you imagine how stressed the listener is when they just wanted the sequence of events and Kihrin (the main character) is describing how beautiful the sunset was and how horny he was for Teraeth?). The darker of the two: Lyons took it upon herself to discuss slavery in depth (her idea of it) but like, she's white. To be clear, I am also white, and I'm not saying that white people can't discuss slavery in a complex way in a story. Lyons just did it bad. Instead of taking an in depth, systemic, social perspective on the matter, Lyons decided to make the slavery discussion complex by describing how unpleasant it is to be a slave. So a side plot of the series is destroying slavery. I just feel like, when slavery is this prominent of a feature of a story and the characters decide to fight against the injustice of it, it shouldn't be a side gig. And there were these weird moments where we're in Kihrin's (the main character) pov and he's like, "Wow, this person was a slave and that's fucked up because slavery is painful and they're such a nice person." And that's not the profound statement the story acts like it is. And like I said earlier, Lyons didn’t pay narrative attention to the actual harm that slavery does to a culture but the story acts like she did. Like so many of her story plots, she made it a prominent part of the story then later said that with time and friendship the problem resolved itself. But Lyons, YOU SAID that this was a TRAUMATIC and COMPLICATED ISSUE YOURSELF!
Onto my next accusation:
I love Kihrin as a character, for the most part. He’s funny, traumatized, powerful, compassionate, loyal, intelligent, you know, a good character. In theory. He was written badly. Because the problem with this series was not the story, dearest reader. I have read stories where the shit is fucked up, the stakes are high, the characters complex, the romance potentially problematic, and yet, the books were so good. This series was not bad because the story was bad. It was fucked up because Lyons is fucked up. I cannot say if it is her personality that is questionable or just her writing, but let me tell you, my good readers, if you are a normal person with any bit of media literacy and political sensitivity, this series will tear your mind to pieces.
I confess, in my opinion, Lyons is just bad at letting her characters be relatable and complex. They feel like caricatures, ideas for characters, not someone you can talk with, they are someone that talks AT you. Her characters have traits, they have quirks, they even have different ways of talking. But they never have stripped-down, vulnerable moments where they become someone you feel close to. They stay in that sarcastic, motivated, before-you-learn-their-backstory stage throughout the whole series. In certain scenes Lyons pretended they were heartfelt moments, but in those moments the writing would feel like someone was grading Lyons on emotional writing. It felt, to me, like these were required bits of the story that Lyons didn't know how to write on her own so she followed a special format with suggested wording. Even if that isn't true the writing is bad, and I hated those scenes because it felt like it was trying so hard to be profound and vulnerable but Lyons was watching you while you read it and her eyes were pleading you to relate and care about her sexy, smart characters.
Onwards and upwards, Lyons is weird about sex. Everyone, all the time was horny and apparently everyone, all the time was also sexy. I am demisexual, I don’t experience sexual attraction often but when I do it’s nothing like how Lyons described. On top of that, Lyons took time to write that her characters were horny in the midst of survival. While running into a physical confrontation her character would think to themself, hmm, this other character is hot. I just feel like that not important for the readers to know. But every other moment in the story also let the reader know on a scale from one to ten (not literally) how horny the character was at the time. And just… why? It NEVER felt like normal hormones either. Lyons always made it weird, by mentioning some sort of kink or taboo. She also let us know how sexually attracted each character we read the POV was to many of the characters around them including characters you wouldn’t think were even options. It’s almost like she can't talk about sex in a normal way. I wonder if she has had kinky sex because the way she writes sex in general indicates that no, she has not. She writes of sexual encounters as if she is a fifteen-year-old set loose on the internet and just emotionally contained enough to know that there IS a line to toe but not exactly sure where that line is. Our lovely hero, Kihrin, he is barely fifteen at the start of the story and his kind of godmother, a brothel owner who knows her kind of godchild has just experienced trauma, encourages him to release his emotions ON HER EMPLOYEE! Later, when Kihrin has been displaced into the abusive arms of his father at the awkward age of sixteen, he falls victim to his not-stepmom and partakes in bondage play. At the time he HAD thought he was having sex with his stepmom but later found out he had sex with a shapeshifter. And then later he is extremely attracted to this guy named Teraeth and their slow-burn romance begins only for it to be revealed that Teraeth inhabits the BODY of Kihrin’s BIOLOGICAL COUSIN. No!!! That was my gay ship! Now it’s incest, Lyon’s how could you?! It was at this point that I first thought about giving up. The sex stuff is just so weird. I persisted. Lyons continues writing the characters’ slow burn romance.
There was a cliche soulmate thing revealed in the first book between Kihrin and a girl with red eyes. (That's creepy but okay) Her name is Janelle. In the second book, she and Kihrin hit it off. No, Lyons!! My problematic gay ship, YOUR problematic gay ship! Fear not, polyamory was encouraged in this series, the problematic gay ship was secure.
So here, I pause. Let’s take a moment to consider the themes of this story. We got mind games, weird family trees, and kind of incest but not quite incest. Clearly, incest is important to the story, yes? No. Incest is not in the story because Lyons has any commentary on it other than it's taboo and makes the story more. . . Gross. At any moment in the story, Lyons might spring incest on us. Teraeth, Kihrin’s slow-burn love interest, in soul, is NOT related to Kihrin. Reincarnation is something he experiences and because he is sexy, special demigod he gets to keep his memories of his past lives and his time in the afterlife. In this story, he is reincarnated into the body of Kihrin’s cousin. Lyons dares us to ask, if they got together, would that be incest? Personally, I think it would. Lyons says that we do not need to worry because Teraeth’s SOUL is not related to Kihrin’s soul. But I dare us to ask, can souls be related? And um, IF THEYRE NOT RELATED WHY ARE THEY STILL RELATED LYONS?!?! She was so careful to make sure we, the readers, her audience, KNOW that her characters, who are sexually and romantically interested in each other ARE TECHNICALLY RELATED! there is no plot-relevant reason for them to be related in the story. Lyons didn’t need to give us incest jump scares. This is a made up, fantasy story where Lyons can do anything she wants. For example, she can make dragons fall in love, she can make flying ships. But she, VERY METICULOUSLY(!) created weird incest situations. Are we exploring the trauma and ethics of incest in this series? Is there some emotional or political lesson to be learned in this story? No! The ONLY evident reason for there to be an INCEST romance is because Lyons thinks it’s, I don't know, edgy, hot, mature, sweet?
So that was fun, do you want to see how else the Chorus of Dragons series was queer-inclusive?
I’ll give you one guess.
WRONG!
It’s horses. Like this 🐎
We got trans representation by way of equines. How? So Janelle, our other love interest, isn’t a woman. She is a stallion. What, you ask. Yes, you see, in Janelle’s homeland, gender binaries were stored in the horse. A stallion was a masculine horse and a mare a feminine horse. Because Lyons, despite the hardship of being cis-gendered, was creative. Never mind that stallions are male horses and mares are female horses. It’s DIFFERENT from the human social gender binary system because Lyons said so. So Janelle's human culture determines their gender hierarchy based on the masculine-to-feminine binary - that humans have placed on horses - of horses. And Janelle, though not male (it is important to Lyons that we know that Janelle is a biological human female) was in her culture a stallion. So she had more political power than a mare (human) would. Janelle hated being called a woman, it was important to her that her partners recognized her as a masculine person and validated her gender as a stallion. But Kihrin and Teraeth didn’t. Not only did they see her as a woman but so did the general narrative of the story. Janelle was consistently referred to as a noblewoman, as on the feminine end of the cultural binary in almost all things. And when Janelle would take offense to this it was supposed to be funny.
So fuck non-binary people I guess.
And how else was the story transphobic? Kihrin, in the beginning of the story, was ashamed of being attracted to not only women. In the third book he had a small character growth moment where he said fuck it, and kissed Teraeth. It was cringy. But uh, he was already with Janelle at that point. And Janelle wasn’t ever a woman. So non-binary people’s experience of their own gender WAS NOT seen as valid. Got it Lyons.
Would never recommend. 2/5 because the writing was good sometimes.
First of all, I wanted, I sooo wanted to love this series. I am weak to the icky vibes these books emit. They’re like molasses cookies to me. When I first found this series I was so excited to read them that I bought the first four books. And then read the first one in, like, a week. There was some shit in there, I was honest with myself in that. But there are four more books. All of the bullshit could be redeemed in four books. Overwhelmed with all the events and emotions I had read and experienced from reading the first book, I took a break. Once my mental stability had returned, I dove into the second book. And hated what I was seeing. So I took another break. Then dove into the third. I was shocked. I was aghast. I flipped through it, skimming as fast as I could. Oh no, I jumped into the fourth, OH NO! I come to you, dear reader, exhausted yet filled with rage.
Lyons' writing is confusing (read deceitful). She is good at writing entertainingly and creatively and has interesting story ideas. But she doesn't tell us the story she promises. It's as if the story is just one short chapter away from getting to the good and promised part, but we never get there. Every time I arrived at a revealing and/or climatic scene it was as if someone had chewed it up before I got there. Meaning: the story stopped making sense because instead everything else that feels irrelevant got dumped into the scenes. Random as fuck characters would come along, weird magical shit from out of nowhere would join to explain the happenings in the most confusing way possible. Mind you, these characters or magical things were often not foreshadowed earlier in the story. These scenes were often the moments these persons or rituals were INTRODUCED. And if they had been earlier introduced they had almost nothing that was plot relevant leading back to them except another character with random stores of information. And NEVER did these random characters and situations tie into each other in any logical way! Patient reader, this happened all the time.
Narratively, I have two problems with the Chorus of Dragons series. Starting with the lighter of the two, what is with this magic system? Maybe it'd be more accurate to say systems? I love a good mind fuck but Lyons takes it to an extreme I didn't know was possible. She has wacky (in my opinion, stupid) ideas such as : putting the majority of the story arch inside a villain’s brain, doing soul and body switches, jumping into the afterlife, and making the most complicated family trees known to fiction. I hate it. Patient reader, I don’t hate creative story ideas. I hate how meticulous and detailed each of these plot devices and choices are. Oh and, Lyons starts every book with the characters rehashing what happened, instead of like, just following them through the story. I can only assume she does this so her meta commentary on the events and people fits inside the story HOWEVER sometimes the writing is flowery writing but according to the beginning of the chapters these are the exact words the characters are using while telling the events to someone else. I hate it! This is a me thing, I know that. I am bad a suspending my disbelief when it comes to these types of things (can you imagine how stressed the listener is when they just wanted the sequence of events and Kihrin (the main character) is describing how beautiful the sunset was and how horny he was for Teraeth?). The darker of the two: Lyons took it upon herself to discuss slavery in depth (her idea of it) but like, she's white. To be clear, I am also white, and I'm not saying that white people can't discuss slavery in a complex way in a story. Lyons just did it bad. Instead of taking an in depth, systemic, social perspective on the matter, Lyons decided to make the slavery discussion complex by describing how unpleasant it is to be a slave. So a side plot of the series is destroying slavery. I just feel like, when slavery is this prominent of a feature of a story and the characters decide to fight against the injustice of it, it shouldn't be a side gig. And there were these weird moments where we're in Kihrin's (the main character) pov and he's like, "Wow, this person was a slave and that's fucked up because slavery is painful and they're such a nice person." And that's not the profound statement the story acts like it is. And like I said earlier, Lyons didn’t pay narrative attention to the actual harm that slavery does to a culture but the story acts like she did. Like so many of her story plots, she made it a prominent part of the story then later said that with time and friendship the problem resolved itself. But Lyons, YOU SAID that this was a TRAUMATIC and COMPLICATED ISSUE YOURSELF!
Onto my next accusation:
I love Kihrin as a character, for the most part. He’s funny, traumatized, powerful, compassionate, loyal, intelligent, you know, a good character. In theory. He was written badly. Because the problem with this series was not the story, dearest reader. I have read stories where the shit is fucked up, the stakes are high, the characters complex, the romance potentially problematic, and yet, the books were so good. This series was not bad because the story was bad. It was fucked up because Lyons is fucked up. I cannot say if it is her personality that is questionable or just her writing, but let me tell you, my good readers, if you are a normal person with any bit of media literacy and political sensitivity, this series will tear your mind to pieces.
I confess, in my opinion, Lyons is just bad at letting her characters be relatable and complex. They feel like caricatures, ideas for characters, not someone you can talk with, they are someone that talks AT you. Her characters have traits, they have quirks, they even have different ways of talking. But they never have stripped-down, vulnerable moments where they become someone you feel close to. They stay in that sarcastic, motivated, before-you-learn-their-backstory stage throughout the whole series. In certain scenes Lyons pretended they were heartfelt moments, but in those moments the writing would feel like someone was grading Lyons on emotional writing. It felt, to me, like these were required bits of the story that Lyons didn't know how to write on her own so she followed a special format with suggested wording. Even if that isn't true the writing is bad, and I hated those scenes because it felt like it was trying so hard to be profound and vulnerable but Lyons was watching you while you read it and her eyes were pleading you to relate and care about her sexy, smart characters.
Onwards and upwards, Lyons is weird about sex. Everyone, all the time was horny and apparently everyone, all the time was also sexy. I am demisexual, I don’t experience sexual attraction often but when I do it’s nothing like how Lyons described. On top of that, Lyons took time to write that her characters were horny in the midst of survival. While running into a physical confrontation her character would think to themself, hmm, this other character is hot. I just feel like that not important for the readers to know. But every other moment in the story also let the reader know on a scale from one to ten (not literally) how horny the character was at the time. And just… why? It NEVER felt like normal hormones either. Lyons always made it weird, by mentioning some sort of kink or taboo. She also let us know how sexually attracted each character we read the POV was to many of the characters around them including characters you wouldn’t think were even options. It’s almost like she can't talk about sex in a normal way. I wonder if she has had kinky sex because the way she writes sex in general indicates that no, she has not. She writes of sexual encounters as if she is a fifteen-year-old set loose on the internet and just emotionally contained enough to know that there IS a line to toe but not exactly sure where that line is. Our lovely hero, Kihrin, he is barely fifteen at the start of the story and his kind of godmother, a brothel owner who knows her kind of godchild has just experienced trauma, encourages him to release his emotions ON HER EMPLOYEE! Later, when Kihrin has been displaced into the abusive arms of his father at the awkward age of sixteen, he falls victim to his not-stepmom and partakes in bondage play. At the time he HAD thought he was having sex with his stepmom but later found out he had sex with a shapeshifter. And then later he is extremely attracted to this guy named Teraeth and their slow-burn romance begins only for it to be revealed that Teraeth inhabits the BODY of Kihrin’s BIOLOGICAL COUSIN. No!!! That was my gay ship! Now it’s incest, Lyon’s how could you?! It was at this point that I first thought about giving up. The sex stuff is just so weird. I persisted. Lyons continues writing the characters’ slow burn romance.
There was a cliche soulmate thing revealed in the first book between Kihrin and a girl with red eyes. (That's creepy but okay) Her name is Janelle. In the second book, she and Kihrin hit it off. No, Lyons!! My problematic gay ship, YOUR problematic gay ship! Fear not, polyamory was encouraged in this series, the problematic gay ship was secure.
So here, I pause. Let’s take a moment to consider the themes of this story. We got mind games, weird family trees, and kind of incest but not quite incest. Clearly, incest is important to the story, yes? No. Incest is not in the story because Lyons has any commentary on it other than it's taboo and makes the story more. . . Gross. At any moment in the story, Lyons might spring incest on us. Teraeth, Kihrin’s slow-burn love interest, in soul, is NOT related to Kihrin. Reincarnation is something he experiences and because he is sexy, special demigod he gets to keep his memories of his past lives and his time in the afterlife. In this story, he is reincarnated into the body of Kihrin’s cousin. Lyons dares us to ask, if they got together, would that be incest? Personally, I think it would. Lyons says that we do not need to worry because Teraeth’s SOUL is not related to Kihrin’s soul. But I dare us to ask, can souls be related? And um, IF THEYRE NOT RELATED WHY ARE THEY STILL RELATED LYONS?!?! She was so careful to make sure we, the readers, her audience, KNOW that her characters, who are sexually and romantically interested in each other ARE TECHNICALLY RELATED! there is no plot-relevant reason for them to be related in the story. Lyons didn’t need to give us incest jump scares. This is a made up, fantasy story where Lyons can do anything she wants. For example, she can make dragons fall in love, she can make flying ships. But she, VERY METICULOUSLY(!) created weird incest situations. Are we exploring the trauma and ethics of incest in this series? Is there some emotional or political lesson to be learned in this story? No! The ONLY evident reason for there to be an INCEST romance is because Lyons thinks it’s, I don't know, edgy, hot, mature, sweet?
So that was fun, do you want to see how else the Chorus of Dragons series was queer-inclusive?
I’ll give you one guess.
WRONG!
It’s horses. Like this 🐎
We got trans representation by way of equines. How? So Janelle, our other love interest, isn’t a woman. She is a stallion. What, you ask. Yes, you see, in Janelle’s homeland, gender binaries were stored in the horse. A stallion was a masculine horse and a mare a feminine horse. Because Lyons, despite the hardship of being cis-gendered, was creative. Never mind that stallions are male horses and mares are female horses. It’s DIFFERENT from the human social gender binary system because Lyons said so. So Janelle's human culture determines their gender hierarchy based on the masculine-to-feminine binary - that humans have placed on horses - of horses. And Janelle, though not male (it is important to Lyons that we know that Janelle is a biological human female) was in her culture a stallion. So she had more political power than a mare (human) would. Janelle hated being called a woman, it was important to her that her partners recognized her as a masculine person and validated her gender as a stallion. But Kihrin and Teraeth didn’t. Not only did they see her as a woman but so did the general narrative of the story. Janelle was consistently referred to as a noblewoman, as on the feminine end of the cultural binary in almost all things. And when Janelle would take offense to this it was supposed to be funny.
So fuck non-binary people I guess.
And how else was the story transphobic? Kihrin, in the beginning of the story, was ashamed of being attracted to not only women. In the third book he had a small character growth moment where he said fuck it, and kissed Teraeth. It was cringy. But uh, he was already with Janelle at that point. And Janelle wasn’t ever a woman. So non-binary people’s experience of their own gender WAS NOT seen as valid. Got it Lyons.
Would never recommend. 2/5 because the writing was good sometimes.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Bullying, Domestic abuse, Homophobia, Incest, Classism
Moderate: Transphobia
Minor: Homophobia, Misogyny, Racial slurs, Racism, Rape, Grief, Cultural appropriation
me: oh an ADULT fantasy ok sounds interesting
mc: hello im 15 years old
me: not this shit again....
ok but jokes aside, when i picked this up at the library i had zero expectations since ive never heard of this series before and i just wanted to read something that sounded cool lmao & i was pleasantly surprised by how fun & different this book was!!
ngl, the beginning is v v hard to get into & i contemplated giving up with how convoluted the world building was with the different narrations and timelines and i didnt understand shit but once the plot actually started moving & i got the hang of the general gist of what was going on, it was super easy to get pulled into the story.....and the back & forth narration actually worked for me once that happened???? im not a big fan of first POV so the third POV narrations from the other characters balanced it out for me... also: the footnotes are THE funniest fking part of the books also also: Teraeth is the loml
anw, this was a fun read but didnt realise it was a 5 PART SERIES :') so i will be otw to slowly make progress through the next book...........
mc: hello im 15 years old
me: not this shit again....
ok but jokes aside, when i picked this up at the library i had zero expectations since ive never heard of this series before and i just wanted to read something that sounded cool lmao & i was pleasantly surprised by how fun & different this book was!!
ngl, the beginning is v v hard to get into & i contemplated giving up with how convoluted the world building was with the different narrations and timelines and i didnt understand shit but once the plot actually started moving & i got the hang of the general gist of what was going on, it was super easy to get pulled into the story.....and the back & forth narration actually worked for me once that happened???? im not a big fan of first POV so the third POV narrations from the other characters balanced it out for me... also: the footnotes are THE funniest fking part of the books also also: Teraeth is the loml
anw, this was a fun read but didnt realise it was a 5 PART SERIES :') so i will be otw to slowly make progress through the next book...........
Other than one quirk, I really enjoyed the beginnings of this book. But about three quarters through, I was thoroughly confused and put off by the various levels of former lives, switched lives, names, years lived, and parentage each character had. On top of this, I did not understand at all what anyone was working towards. I have enjoyed books where there is not one “big goal” to be achieved. But it seemed there was supposed to be one here and I missed it. Given what I though was a high level of writing from the author, I think I just didn’t fit well with this story.
- None of the characters felt real - all very 2 dimensional
- World building was lacking
- Felt like lots of different fantasy elements were just thrown together to try and create some kind of epic fantasy and it just fell flat