Scan barcode
shelvesofivy's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.75
Graphic: Gun violence, Death, Blood, and Violence
Moderate: Abandonment, Pedophilia, Sexual harassment, Grief, Death of parent, and Vomit
Minor: Sexual content, Torture, and Fire/Fire injury
drugged drinklucnator's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Moderate: Pedophilia
kait_sixcrowsbooks's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Ace of Shades is the first book in a YA fantasy series that follows good-girl Enne trying to find her adoptive mother Lourdes and gang lord Levi who’s trying to get out from underneath an immense debt. I know one of the comps is Six of Crows and while I don’t really agree wholeheartedly, I do think that there’s a similar vibe, especially in the later half of the book.
Overall, I quite enjoyed the book — the characters were engaging, and I thought the plot was interesting. While I was a bit lost re: the worldbuilding and the different families and such, it wasn’t enough that I was completely confused on what was going on. I think it’s one of those things you pick up more as you go throughout the series. The beginning was a tad slow, but I think the story starts to really take hold and shine once you get past the first hundred pages. And even the first part of the book isn’t necessarily bad — I was enjoying the deep dive as Enne explored New Reynes trying to look for Lourdes. It just took a while to fully grip me is all.
But yeah, I really can’t wait to see what’s next for this crew of characters; I can tell it’s gonna be something big.
Graphic: Violence
Moderate: Death
Minor: Pedophilia, Vomit, and Injury/Injury detail
riflelizards's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
4.5
Graphic: Murder, Classism, Death of parent, Violence, Alcohol, Grief, and Abandonment
Moderate: Drug use, Fire/Fire injury, Injury/Injury detail, and Blood
Minor: Addiction, War, Torture, and Pedophilia
ramunepocky's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
The magic system was absolutely my favourite part!!! I loved the concept of having blood talents that come from your parents and that they can be split, either equally or not so much, and how they can range from the mundane to truly horrifying talents that can bind and force others to do your bidding. I’m intrigued to learn more about the misers and what particularly made them so dangerous that the Phoenix Club felt the need to wipe them all out and everyone else was glad of it, considering the extent of what we know right now is that they have purple eyes and can make volts.
I am also fascinated by the Shadow Game and cannot wait to learn more about it !!! The concept of betting with your life energy and what you have to do to win/how no one has ever won is so interesting !!!
Character-wise, I rlly truly loved Lola, she was my absolute favourite !!! I love that she armed herself with knives, and I was saddened to learn of her backstory with her family/brother, and I liked watching her reluctant friendship with Enne blossom as she realised the person Enne actually was. I also think her talent of being able to read other people’s talents through their blood and reading their history was so damn interesting!!!
Levi was my second favourite and it pained me to see all the shit he lost through Vianca’s schemes, including being the Lord of the gang he’d built himself, in his desperate attempts to stay alive after she’d put him at risk and continued to take advantage of him. I loved his sarcasm and wit; he’d often make me laugh with the off handed things he’d say and I loved his friendship with Jac b/c they were both just so funny. I think it was sweet that after considering robbing her and sending her away from the get-go, and then only helping her to pay off his own debts, he became quickly protective of Enne and willing to go to any length to help her. Also the fact that he’d built up his gang by rescuing kids and saving their lives, after Raymond had done the same for him!!! It pained me as much as it pained him when Raymond was killed and he lost someone so important to him, and almost lost the same with Jac too.
I’m not currently sure where I stand with Enne; I hated her to begin with and she rlly grinded my gears, but as she built up her confidence and adjusted to the city of sin and relaxed into being ruthless, I enjoyed that side of her a lot more, like when she poisoned and later killed Sedric, and when she fought Lola for her life. She still winds me up fairly often and there’s certain aspects of the way she thinks/speaks that I just don’t get along with, but I’m excited to see her grow more in the following books and see who she becomes. I also don’t rlly understand why she was so surprised when she learned that Lourdes was dead after she’d literally told her if I don’t come back by this many days, I’m probably dead like ??? She legit told you she’d be dead, why are you shocked???? *doesn’t understand* I am intrigued to learn more about Enne and her backstory tho.\
I also loved Jac so much!!! He made me laugh so often and I adored his friendship with Levi and how they cared for one another.
All in all, a great book and I’m very excited to read the rest of the series and see where it goes and learn more about these characters that I’m already so fond of and learn more about such an interesting world and magic system !!!!
Graphic: Violence, Murder, Death, and Gun violence
Moderate: Pedophilia, Death of parent, and Fire/Fire injury
ellie_gonzalez's review against another edition
- 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
4.5
Graphic: Death of parent, Murder, and Physical abuse
Moderate: Pedophilia, Fire/Fire injury, and Addiction
huldasif's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.75
Graphic: Murder and Gun violence
Moderate: Child abuse, Violence, Pedophilia, Death of parent, and Sexual harassment
mitacaparos's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.25
Moderate: Pedophilia
Minor: Body horror
sp522's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
Graphic: Violence
Moderate: Pedophilia, Drug use, Vomit, and Sexual harassment
3mmers's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5
Ace of Shades opens as Enne Salta, débutante and ballerina from the idyllic and boring suburbs, steps off the boat into the notorious City of Sin, New Reynes after the disappearance of her mysterious political writer mother. Enne’s only lead is teen card shark Levi Glaisyer. Unfortunately, Levi is less help than she expected. He’s in over his head trying to bail himself out of the bottom of a pyramid scheme and has never heard of her mother. But when Enne offers him a lifesaving amount of money he agrees to help her. Their search drags Enne into the city’s notoriously sordid gambling district and its notoriously bloody past as she starts to realize just how many dangerous secrets her mother was hiding from her. Levi’s grasp on his failing scheme weakens and he learns just how little power he has among the new royalty of New Reynes’ casinos. All threads point towards the bloody deaths of the aristocracy of the old regime orchestrated by the mysterious and deadly Shadow Game. The deck is stacked against them and Levi and Enne will have to bet it all for a chance at survival. But at the end of the day the house will always win.
As I struggled to summarize the plot it became very clear that Ace of Shades' sequence of events is weak. While I did avoid some plot beats to preserve a few of the better reveals, mostly I had trouble deciding what to include because individual events are not well unified into a single story. Scenes work fine in isolation in the context of the story I kept stopping to ask ‘wait, why is this important?’ For example, most plot threads will end with the characters going to bed and agreeing to meet up the next day, rather than taking the next step of the investigation. While it may be more realistic, it’s also a symptom that the leads not well connected. Rather than one leading (lol) into another, the protagonists pursue each clue to its disappointing conclusion, and then have to wait around for a new one to appear. It’s tough to follow how one event leads to the next, or how the actions of the protagonists change the events of the novel. While Ace of Shades is nominally a mystery, it is full of unrelated side arcs. As an example,
To be honest the overarching plot was not what I thought about the most while I was reading. It was the sort of thing that only really bothered me in retrospect. In the moment, the most compromised part of the experience was the worldbuilding. It is a land of contrasts, some fascinatingly good ideas and some so mindblowingly out of place I almost noped out of the entire series. First, the good. I did like the general concept of a setting rife with general hedonism: gambling, debauchery, drugs and alcohol, rather than the proliferation of murder in other gritty settings. There’s a lot of novelty to fantasy Las Vegas and the best character is the one most closely related to that concept (
The pursuit of cool details without much thought into how they would work in service of the whole is what led to my dissatisfaction with the worldbuilding. Ace of Shades has a major issue with tonal inconsistency. It ping pongs between goofy crap and then elements so dark that I genuinely don’t know whether the author realized it. The most egregious example is Jack’s backstory. Jack is Levi’s sidekick and his more earnest and direct counterpart. He’s not particularly deep, except that his backstory is that
The tone is annoying, but the magic system is genuinely bad. It is incredibly arbitrary, in other words, the magic does not have an internal logic or set of rules that govern its power and limitations. ATLA is a very logical magic system, Harry Potter is arbitrary. Arbitrary magic systems allow the author a lot of freedom to create powers that are cool and useful but at the risk of seeming overpowered, artificial, or even goofy. Ace of Shades’ magic feels extremely artificial throughout due to the massive power differences between different characters. The magic in this world ranges from barely supernatural (some people are unusually fast or strong but these powers do not really feel like they exceed the abilities of professional athletes) to essentially free mind control. The more powerful supernatural abilities have limitations that look like they’re taken directly from TTRPGs and never edited. For example,
To summarize, Ace of Shades is essentially fine. It’s a good book tackling an underutilized setting and concept, but it fails to use any of the new concepts it brings to the table, making it feel more formulaic than it should. While its more fundamental components were okay, the novel lost me with its frustrating, poorly thought out, and distracting details. Here’s hoping the sequel brings it back around.
Moderate: Injury/Injury detail and Pedophilia
Minor: Drug abuse, Addiction, and Sexual assault