Review by leslie_mg - Emperor of Ruin

leslie_mg 's review for:

Emperor of Ruin by Django Wexler

4.0

adventurous dark emotional funny tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

A solid end to a solid series! I found that the plot went at a fairly fast pace in this, as we’ve reached the crux of the story and things are pretty action-packed. I liked the bits of the past we got to see, as it explained a lot of the world’s history that we knew very little about. The magic system and world itself remained interesting to me, and I appreciated finally getting the answers to questions we’ve had for awhile. I will say the world still felt a little small to me? It never really felt like a rich world existed beyond where we were located with our characters. I certainly liked the settings we were in, but the scope remained feeling small, despite the events that took place.

I continued to really like all of the characters! Both Gyre and Maya go through quite a bit of growth as they’re faced with things that conflict with their beliefs and worldviews, and while they remained who they were at their core, they did evolve. I think this was helped by the fact that they finally get go spend a more significant amount of fine together, and I liked seeing their dynamic. The side characters were still fun, although we had some new additions that were a tad less interesting to me.The bits of humour that are injected primarily by some of the side characters are a nice way to balance all of the events of the book, which I’d say is pretty action-heavy at certain points. This brings me to a smaller gripe, which is that I wished we had been able to see a bit more of the aftermath of the climax and defeat of our enemies. This is mostly personal preference, as I don’t think this was done poorly and I still left mostly satisfied, but our characters and the world are left with quite the situation to deal with and I would’ve liked seeing a bit more of how things played out.

Overall I enjoyed this series! It never quite gave me that 5-star feeling, but it did work me. Big bonus points for the casual queerness of the world and the sapphic relationship(s) that were cute and done very well.

Content Warnings