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A review by nonesensed
The Impossible Contract by K.A. Doore
4.5
Thana is the daughter of a legendary assassin. Naturally, as a young woman in the same field of work, of calling, she's eager to follow in her mother's footsteps, to live up to her legacy. Thus, she's more than eager to take on a seeming impossible contract: kill a foreign ambassador who has literal magic to call on for defense. She might have bitten off more than she can chew.
Well, this series escalated quickly.
I usually try to avoid spoilers in reviews, but it's hard to explain what I thought about this book without heading into spoiler territory. So, here we are.
This isn't the first trilogy that's switched main characters on me for the second book. This isn't the only trilogy that's got a huge time-skip between book 1 and 2. Neither of those two things are in themselves negative. What threw me a bit was the lack of foreshadowing for this huge change at the end of book one (at least that I noticed). Amastan and his many relationships drew me into the first book and made me invested in Ghadid as a city and a society. I wanted more of his missions, him learning to become an assassin, the return of his star-crossed love interest, of Ghadid's internal politics.
And I didn't get that.
Don't get me wrong, I like Thana. I like her romance, I like her personality, I like the challenge she's facing. But her flavor of story is very different from the first book. In the first story, we had a murder mystery of sorts and local political intrigue. In this book, we get world ending levels of destruction on the line. Ghadid gets destroyed off-screen! So many characters I'd come to love or at least find interesting just, dead, after barely being in the book at all.
I don't think this was a badly written book or anything. It was just a jarring switch in tone, scope and cast. Will be interesting to see how book three feels, now that I'm prepared for a drastic change.
Well, this series escalated quickly.
I usually try to avoid spoilers in reviews, but it's hard to explain what I thought about this book without heading into spoiler territory. So, here we are.
This isn't the first trilogy that's switched main characters on me for the second book. This isn't the only trilogy that's got a huge time-skip between book 1 and 2. Neither of those two things are in themselves negative. What threw me a bit was the lack of foreshadowing for this huge change at the end of book one (at least that I noticed). Amastan and his many relationships drew me into the first book and made me invested in Ghadid as a city and a society. I wanted more of his missions, him learning to become an assassin, the return of his star-crossed love interest, of Ghadid's internal politics.
And I didn't get that.
Don't get me wrong, I like Thana. I like her romance, I like her personality, I like the challenge she's facing. But her flavor of story is very different from the first book. In the first story, we had a murder mystery of sorts and local political intrigue. In this book, we get world ending levels of destruction on the line. Ghadid gets destroyed off-screen! So many characters I'd come to love or at least find interesting just, dead, after barely being in the book at all.
I don't think this was a badly written book or anything. It was just a jarring switch in tone, scope and cast. Will be interesting to see how book three feels, now that I'm prepared for a drastic change.