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A review by alexauthorshay
The Red Queen by Isobelle Carmody
2.0
There are no words, but I'll try anyways.
I'm not as angry as some people have gotten because I picked this series up only a few years ago, so I didn't have a super long wait. I read the first 6 books (NA editions) and then had to wait for the remaining two so I put the series down for a few years and forgot about it. This book isn't actually out in the NA editions yet so I had to hunt to find it and it was 769 pages of waste-of-my-time.
As mentioned in other reviews, most of it is just Elspeth "gnawing". There is a drastic lack of proper punctuation and way too many spelling errors for this to be edited properly. It takes 100 pages just to pick up and get interesting, which is an extra 100 pages of boring you have to read after the entirety of the previous book.
The ending with Ariel was irredeemably bad. After spending so much time on a series you should have one hell of an ending for readers and this was just a flop. While Carmody did manage to tie most of the loose ends up, she did it hastily within the last 50 pages which is ridiculous. Parts of the last novel that were super important are forgotten for huge chunks of this book, and very important things that need to get done get forgotten and thrown back in later.
Dameon's love interest is sudden and unannounced, Dragon's personality is all over the place, the wolves come and go just in the nick of time from several distant but convenient hiding places that are never really elaborated on, Elspeth is conveniently unconscious for the overthrow of the Chafiri/Ekoni so everything about the battle is described only vaguely through second hand description, Salamander's identity is hinted at but it's never revealed how Jakoby came to know who they were. But the worst part of the entire book? Elspeth's whole quest is to shut down Sentinel. She spends 6 1/2 (8 1/2 in NA) books collecting information and items for her quest, and the whole Sentinel scene takes maybe 5 pages. I'm sorry but if the focus of your entire series is taking down Sentinel, it better be one hell of an adversary or provide a lot of obstacles. There are neither. I'm just glad it's over at this point.
I'm not as angry as some people have gotten because I picked this series up only a few years ago, so I didn't have a super long wait. I read the first 6 books (NA editions) and then had to wait for the remaining two so I put the series down for a few years and forgot about it. This book isn't actually out in the NA editions yet so I had to hunt to find it and it was 769 pages of waste-of-my-time.
As mentioned in other reviews, most of it is just Elspeth "gnawing". There is a drastic lack of proper punctuation and way too many spelling errors for this to be edited properly. It takes 100 pages just to pick up and get interesting, which is an extra 100 pages of boring you have to read after the entirety of the previous book.
The ending with Ariel was irredeemably bad. After spending so much time on a series you should have one hell of an ending for readers and this was just a flop. While Carmody did manage to tie most of the loose ends up, she did it hastily within the last 50 pages which is ridiculous. Parts of the last novel that were super important are forgotten for huge chunks of this book, and very important things that need to get done get forgotten and thrown back in later.
Dameon's love interest is sudden and unannounced, Dragon's personality is all over the place, the wolves come and go just in the nick of time from several distant but convenient hiding places that are never really elaborated on, Elspeth is conveniently unconscious for the overthrow of the Chafiri/Ekoni so everything about the battle is described only vaguely through second hand description, Salamander's identity is hinted at but it's never revealed how Jakoby came to know who they were. But the worst part of the entire book? Elspeth's whole quest is to shut down Sentinel. She spends 6 1/2 (8 1/2 in NA) books collecting information and items for her quest, and the whole Sentinel scene takes maybe 5 pages. I'm sorry but if the focus of your entire series is taking down Sentinel, it better be one hell of an adversary or provide a lot of obstacles. There are neither. I'm just glad it's over at this point.