A review by cranberry101
House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J. Maas

adventurous tense slow-paced
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

1.0

IM FREE!!!! WORST EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFE!!!!

My thoughts are as follows.

  1. First of all, why are all these books 800 pages long? My main gripe with this series is that they are 800 pages long and BORING. 
  2. This world is so messy and confusing I kept having to go back and check the Wiki because nothing makes any sense. There are also 8000000 characters and all of them are boring and forgettable. Not to mention it’s been two years since book 2 was released, how am I supposed to remember who this rando from book 1 (who had like 2 lines) is??????
  3. So many irrelevant side characters with their own POVs and for what. I genuinely want to know if there’s anyone who cares about Ithan or Tharion because I don’t. Ithan kind of redeemed himself in this, but I am coming out loud and proud as a Tharion hater. I know SJM doesn’t kill characters, but if anyone should have died it should have been him.
  4. I need SJM to get a new editor ASAP. So many weird sentences and terrible use of punctuation, this was a nightmare.
  5. Take a shot every time “like calls to like” is used and you will die from alcohol poisoning.
  6. Bryce is the epitome of corny. All her comebacks were basically “I know you are but what am I?” and every “male” (vomits) eats it up. Also she’s so #feminist but there are no female characters in her entourage besides Lidia and that other girl but they barely interact YAY!!!! Also remember Bryce’s “best friends” from the first book? They’re back after making no appearances in book 2 (from my remembrance) and have all about two lines of dialogue before being locked back into the irrelevant woman dungeon by SJM.
  7. The smut scenes felt super out of place, there was a scene where two pages before the characters were mourning all these people that had been literally murdered, and not even two minutes later they’re like you know what we should do now…. ;)
  8. Maybe the SJM crossover was the friends we made along the way. Super hilarious that this book is marketed as a crossover but it’s all done by the 40% mark. I kind of already knew that Bryce and Hunt couldn’t be separated for that long because SJM needs smut scenes to keep the TikTok girlies hooked, but wow, it was disappointing. (not that my hopes were high to begin with)
  9. There are no stakes ever. Oh no we can’t speak the same language as the Pyrinthians?? Here’s a magic bean where you can speak the same language!! (never mentioned in any other book by the way) Oh no there's a poison and we need a cure??? It will be made in like 5 minutes!!!
  10. The absolute worst thing is this -- Oh no someone died??? NECROMANCY!!! Which then makes their deaths totally pointless.
    I know we all hate on Veronica Roth for killing Tris, but at least she had the guts to follow through with killing her main character. SJM FLOP for not leaving FLOP Bryce dead.

Anyways I was happy about finishing this for all of 0.2 seconds until I found SJM has “plans” to continue this series. Why 

 
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