4erepawko's profile picture

4erepawko 's review for:

Grave Empire: Book One of The Great Silence by Richard Swan
4.0
adventurous dark tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
As always, exceptionally well-written in terms of prose, and fantastic worldbuilding. The opening POV has remained my favourite throughout the book and I hope we get to follow more of this character in the next instalments in this series.

However, I didn't love this one as much as The Trials of Empire trilogy, my enjoyment tanked by 3 factors:
  1. Clunky plotting in parts, where it was easy to tell that some scenes/plot points happened only to enable other scenes/plot points, making them feel very forced
  2. Unfortunately, a bunch of "women written by a man" type of characterisations, with some depictions following fatphobic or misogynistic tropes and stereotypes
  3. A completely unnecessary comphet pairing that came out of nowhere. The "a woman and a man of roughly the same age have to get together despite there being 0 build up or reason for it" type

I hope there will be some improvement to the above in the next books in the series, but I'll definitely keep following it as the overall story is very compelling.
Expand filter menu Content Warnings