Scan barcode
A review by crispycritter
The Will of the Many by James Islington
adventurous
mysterious
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
3.0
Do you want to read Fourth Wing? Uncomfortable reading books written from The Female Gaze? Never fear, James Islington is here. Presenting The Will of the Many: Fourth Wing For Boys™️
Instead of an insufferable 20-year old horny lady who always beats the odds despite her “disadvantages” - we have an insufferable 17-year-old heterosexual homoromantic boy who always beats the odds despite his “disadvantages.” He’s just smarter and better than everyone.
Instead of an insufferable 20-year old horny lady who always beats the odds despite her “disadvantages” - we have an insufferable 17-year-old heterosexual homoromantic boy who always beats the odds despite his “disadvantages.” He’s just smarter and better than everyone.
- Indefensibly long, this book has a higher word count than The Priory of the Orange Tree!
- Indefensibly boring for the first 400 pages!
- How does the magic system work? Shhhh there are two more books to explain all that later.
- Adverbs! So many adverbs! One hundred pages could have been cut if we removed all these adverbs!
- Our main character is such a boy genius his POV borders on omniscient! Such good writing!
- Scoping. We see pretty much every single thing our plucky Gary Stu does. We could have cut another hundred pages by cutting some mundane and unnecessary scenes.
- No damsels in distress here, most of the women are bad guys! Equality!!!
- The resistance's position is that normies existing in an unjust society share equal culpability with those in positions of power, thus justifying mass murder! Nuance! Political commentary! Everyone is a bad guy except for a 17-year old boy, a couple of his bros, and oh yeah - his dad, who was a king, but like a good king! He really cared, you guys!
- Chapters start with either cliche platitudes from our boy genius's dead dad OR with our boy genius miraculously waking up in a medical ward after *somehow* surviving unsurvivable circumstances!
- Our main character is maybe possibly brown or a white person with sun-dark skin. We don’t have to be super clear here. Representation!!!
- The last hundred pages are infuriatingly pretty good! This took me five months to slog through!
Was it borderline manipulative to include an absolutely bangin cliffhanger ending after frittering around for 600 pages? Sure felt like it.