Scan barcode
A review by xavia
The Emerald Sea by Richelle Mead
4.0
This book was so much better than the first!
I have not read Mira's book yet. No offense to Mira, but I knew from the moment I met her that Tamsin was my favorite, and this book did not disappoint.
Tamsin embodies one of my favorite character tropes, and that is "the only way out is through". She is feisty and driven and won't let little things like tempests, blizzards, and warring nations stop her. Her motivations make so much more sense here than they did in The Glittering Court and her reason for doing everything feels more legitimate than Adelaide's. From the moment we meet her, there is no doubt in our minds what her goal is, and everything she does is in service of that goal.
While things in her book seemed to happen around Adelaide, it really felt more like Tamsin was happening to the things in her book. She didn't just sit back and move passively through her ordeal like I occasionally felt Adelaide did, she "got things done" and she didn't care who she had to go through to make that happen.
One of the biggest problems I had with The Glittering Court was that the book was riddled with lazy world building and plot holes you could drive freight trains through. In this book, there are really only two instances of that happen. One at the outset of the book, where we essentially gloss over the first hundred pages of The Glittering Court without so much as a "last time on-" and at the very end, where the three stories intersect and there is little done to explain any of the other two plotlines. The author expects you to have read the other books and does nothing to alleviate the situation if you didn't. Beyond that though, Tamsin's story felt so much more COMPLETE than Adelaide's did, and I think a big part of that was tiptoeing around those other plotline that were supposed to hook us, but we couldn't follow.
With Tamsin, just about everything is compact. From the moment she gets on the Grey Gull, she and her survival and her trials are the only thing that matter. And that makes the story feel more like a complete book than The Glittering Court did.
The downside to this, is we don't get to see her interact with Adelaide and Mira hardly at all. She thinks about them, but at no point do we really get to see the three interact the way we did in The Glittering Court, and I found myself really missing that.
I also loved Jago. Cedric was great and interesting and he's a wonderful romantic lead. But Jago is such a perfect compliment to Tamsin's fiery nature that reading him and Tamsin was always a treat. And where I occasionally wished I could be reading about Cedric instead of Adelaide, I never once wished I was reading from some other point of view than Tamsin's. He's just the right amount of interesting and charismatic.
And I think we can all agree, screw the Heirs of Uros.
I have not read Mira's book yet. No offense to Mira, but I knew from the moment I met her that Tamsin was my favorite, and this book did not disappoint.
Tamsin embodies one of my favorite character tropes, and that is "the only way out is through". She is feisty and driven and won't let little things like tempests, blizzards, and warring nations stop her. Her motivations make so much more sense here than they did in The Glittering Court and her reason for doing everything feels more legitimate than Adelaide's. From the moment we meet her, there is no doubt in our minds what her goal is, and everything she does is in service of that goal.
While things in her book seemed to happen around Adelaide, it really felt more like Tamsin was happening to the things in her book. She didn't just sit back and move passively through her ordeal like I occasionally felt Adelaide did, she "got things done" and she didn't care who she had to go through to make that happen.
One of the biggest problems I had with The Glittering Court was that the book was riddled with lazy world building and plot holes you could drive freight trains through. In this book, there are really only two instances of that happen. One at the outset of the book, where we essentially gloss over the first hundred pages of The Glittering Court without so much as a "last time on-" and at the very end, where the three stories intersect and there is little done to explain any of the other two plotlines. The author expects you to have read the other books and does nothing to alleviate the situation if you didn't. Beyond that though, Tamsin's story felt so much more COMPLETE than Adelaide's did, and I think a big part of that was tiptoeing around those other plotline that were supposed to hook us, but we couldn't follow.
With Tamsin, just about everything is compact. From the moment she gets on the Grey Gull, she and her survival and her trials are the only thing that matter. And that makes the story feel more like a complete book than The Glittering Court did.
The downside to this, is we don't get to see her interact with Adelaide and Mira hardly at all. She thinks about them, but at no point do we really get to see the three interact the way we did in The Glittering Court, and I found myself really missing that.
I also loved Jago. Cedric was great and interesting and he's a wonderful romantic lead. But Jago is such a perfect compliment to Tamsin's fiery nature that reading him and Tamsin was always a treat. And where I occasionally wished I could be reading about Cedric instead of Adelaide, I never once wished I was reading from some other point of view than Tamsin's. He's just the right amount of interesting and charismatic.
And I think we can all agree, screw the Heirs of Uros.