A review by eesh25
Rage and Ruin by Jennifer L. Armentrout

2.0

This is officially my least favourite JLA book yet. And that includes the two Lux series books I read. At least they were short. This one put me through hundreds of pages or boredom, exasperation and annoyance, and then had the audacity to pull a last-minute cliffhanger that might make me read the third book. And as you can guess, I'm not happy about it.

The book starts off soon after where the last one ended. Trinity is still dealing with the fact that Misha betrayed her. Her vision is getting worse. And she likes Zayne but can't be with him because he's her protector. Basically, she's got stuff on her mind. And I mention that because it's these factors that kept me trying to make excuses for her. Unfortunately, I ran out of excuses after a while and had to admit that she was acting like a complete twat.

For one, she kept snapping at Zayne for wanting to protect her. He's her protector! It's literally his job! But what really bugged me was the jealousy crap. She was jealous of every woman Zayne came into contact with. She was mad at him for being friends with a woman, even though Zayne has known Stacey for years.

I've seen a few reviews that talk about how Zayne shouldn't have been spending time with Stacey, and I just... fucking why?! He's doing nothing wrong! He has a right to have friends! And contrary to what the book says, he doesn't have to inform Trinity about every person he spends time with. Especially since she can't even handle Stacey's name being mentioned without being a dick about it. And don't even get me started on the hypocrisy of her being upset about Zayne hiding something from her. His personal life is of no concern to her. And she was hiding things the entire time, things that had everything to do with their job.

But you know what, I'm not gonna hate her. Instead, I'm going to blame the book for being a complete waste of six hundred fucking pages. We wouldn't have had to deal with all these non-plots of jealousy and twatty behaviour if the book had just gotten to the fucking point. You know, before the 500-page mark.

Do you know what this book accomplished plot-wise? We found out who this Harbinger is, and there was a climax that leads to a cliffhanger. That's it. Six hundred pages and nothing else happened. One might argue that the author wanted to focus on the romance. But she actually did a disservice there because, while I liked the Trinity and Zayne's relationship in the first book, I couldn't give two fucks about it now. All the pettiness and pointless bullshit killed it for me.

There's also the fact that the villain fucking sucks. He's a ginormous cliche, and he can go fuck himself. And so can Trinity's father. The only thing that made this book slightly more bearable was Roth, who was entertaining. Though I don't have any issue with Zayne either. He just didn't have anything to do the entire book.

And before I rant some more, I'm going to move on to what I'm hoping for with the next book—if I end up reading it, that is. I hope that, by the time it comes out, I forget everything about this book that pissed me off. I also hope that it will actually make me like Trinity again, and care about her relationship with Zayne. I hope that the villain will become less eye-roll-worthy. And that there's an actual fucking plot. That's not too much to ask for, is it?

To conclude... I think I've already said all I wanted to say. Wait, one last thing. Whoever proofread this didn't do that good a job since I clocked three instances of '---- and I' when it should have been 'me and ---.' And... now I'm done.