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sharkfacts 's review for:
The Swan Riders
by Erin Bow
This series is just wildly polarizing, I guess? Some people really seem to love it. Between the rating and the fact that it took me 2 weeks to finish it (I literally forgot I was reading it for a while), I guess it’s pretty clear that I wasn’t a fan. It’s not even any one thing, really. At the end of the day, honestly, I was just bored, and I hate saying that because a real human person wrote this book and dismissing it as boring almost feels worse than commenting on specific flaws.
But still. I don’t know. I didn’t connect to any of the characters on any meaningful level, and I already struggled with that in the first one, so to have this one be worse in that aspect? That sets the book up to be a slog. The overall themes make sense but parts of the plot didn’t seem to, and as a lot of other people have commented, the pacing is odd. Some of the worldbuilding never made sense to the degree I wanted it to.
It’s also just so wildly different from the first book. It doesn’t mesh tonally, and the whole book is about something that was really only present in the last third of the first book. Maybe I would’ve liked this series more if I was prepared for what it actually turned out to be, rather than what I thought it was set up to be. Also, the fact that Xie barely existed in this book despite being such a huge part of The Scorpion Rules was just really odd. I liked her (frankly, she was one of the only characters I liked), and I really wanted to see more of her.
I don’t know. It wasn’t a horrible book and it explored some interesting ideas, but it didn’t really make me care. And isn’t that the point? If other books and movies can explore similar themes and make me genuinely care, I suppose I’ll just stick to that corner of the universe.
But still. I don’t know. I didn’t connect to any of the characters on any meaningful level, and I already struggled with that in the first one, so to have this one be worse in that aspect? That sets the book up to be a slog. The overall themes make sense but parts of the plot didn’t seem to, and as a lot of other people have commented, the pacing is odd. Some of the worldbuilding never made sense to the degree I wanted it to.
It’s also just so wildly different from the first book. It doesn’t mesh tonally, and the whole book is about something that was really only present in the last third of the first book. Maybe I would’ve liked this series more if I was prepared for what it actually turned out to be, rather than what I thought it was set up to be. Also, the fact that Xie barely existed in this book despite being such a huge part of The Scorpion Rules was just really odd. I liked her (frankly, she was one of the only characters I liked), and I really wanted to see more of her.
I don’t know. It wasn’t a horrible book and it explored some interesting ideas, but it didn’t really make me care. And isn’t that the point? If other books and movies can explore similar themes and make me genuinely care, I suppose I’ll just stick to that corner of the universe.