A review by destinae
A Gathering of Shadows by V.E. Schwab

2.5

I wish i could find a kind thing to say about this book. I loved the first one so much— lila is a flawed and frustrating protagonist, but i personally love when a character makes stupid choices. Shes very damaged, and one magical ginger didnt fix that. Thats about where my praise for this entry ends.

This book was bloated, meandering, uneventful, anticlimactic, and predictable. So many plot threads were set up and unceremoniously abandoned. So many chapters could have been cut. The first 300ish pages are devoted to getting the main characters into the same city, and another 100 to getting them in front of each other. 

This book wastes the ink and paper it is written on. This installment falls incredibly flat in the face of a rich, fascinating, engaging first entry. 

A strong example of where this book fails is during the elemental games. Despite spending the first 1-2 hundred pages selling us on lila and alucards dynamic, including magic lessons and countless private moments, we flash back instead to entirely different scenes that never happened to inform lila’s magic. I think this would have been FAR stronger writing if she had flashed back to lessons and advice from earlier in the book—- instead, it insults the time you spent learning about the characters.

Much of the conflict also feels repetitive and less well executed than the first book. Schwab tries to sell the reader on tension between rhy and kell, but then never lets any misunderstandings or misgivings go unresolved.

I write this scathing review not because i hate Schwab, but because i loved her prior writing so much that this installment feels like a kick in the head.