Review by nicolemelina - House of Flame and Shadow

nicolemelina 's review for:

House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J. Maas

3.5

adventurous challenging dark emotional inspiring tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

Where to start—-
While I enjoyed this book (bc let’s be real, Sarah knows how to suck me in), it wasn’t my favorite. It was probably the one that dragged on the most for me in this series for a few reasons:

1. There were way too many POV changes within chapters. It got to be a bit much getting almost 3 POVs from characters that were within the same vicinity of one another. I could see if perhaps we’d gotten multiple POVs from characters in different locations. I feel like this robbed us of more character development from certain people like Ruhn, Lidia, and Ithan mostly. For example,

I really wish we’d gotten Lidia and Ruhn’s journey a bit more fleshed out after he finds out who she is. It felt rushed from the moment he told her she was dead to him, to then being in the archives and speaking again.

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2. I REALLY would’ve loved to see a more fleshed out backstory between Ruhn and Lidia. Their storyline was my favorite in this book I think and the one we got to see the least.

3.

I wish we’d gotten a bit more with Nesta, Azriel, and the Inner Circle. It seemed a bit forced and would’ve liked to see some more of that story and relationship with them and Bryce.

4. SO. MUCH. INFO DUMPING. It was so hard to keep focus with almost 2-4 pages of history being thrown at you every other chapter. This could’ve been spread out throughout the other 2 books. It was a lot.

Overall, I did love the series itself and did of course sob those last 100 pages. But this could’ve probably been broken down into 2 more books to give us some time to process all the information we were getting pelted with.

Content Warnings