A review by turtles1738
Kingdoms of Death by Christopher Ruocchio

2.0

2.5 stars, This book started strong and I loved everything about the Commonwealth. Then Hadrian gets captured and the book becomes almost unbearable with how long it deals with his imprisonment. It feels like 40% of the book is just him being tortured with nothing else really happening. Don't get me wrong I'm a fan of grimdark. Abercrombie is one of my favorite authors and Dark Age by Pierce Brown is my favorite read of last year. The difference is Kingdom of Death has almost zero plot progression during this unnecessarily long torture sequence. Like 90% of it could have been cut and nothing would be lost, because we already know how bad the Cielcin were from the previous books. Also Ruocchio is pretty bad at writing characters you care about.

Spoiler

This became pretty apparent when most of Hadrians crew dies near the end of the book. I honestly didn't care about any of them, despite them all being in series since book 1. Gibson hit and that was about it.