A review by snowwhitehatesapples
These Infinite Threads by Tahereh Mafi

tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? N/A
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

1.0

 Also on Snow White Hates Apples.

In all my years, I’ve never read a sequel as useless as this one because I kid you not, there was only 1% plot. ONE SINGULAR PERCENT PLOT.

At the end of This Woven Kingdom, we witness Kamran having his showdown with Cyrus and Alizeh getting kidnapped by Iblees via dragon. These Infinite Threads continues the story from that point and in a little more than 400 pages, only moved the plot forward by one tiny. little. centimetre.

Alizeh’s perspective in this sequel is legit, a 99% pointless and incredibly juvenile back-and-forth with Cyrus within the timespan of like, 2 days. Plus, with the frequency of this spineless, whiny special snowflake of a damsel in distress uttering “how dare you”, you could have yourself a ‘drink a shot’ challenge and get yourself super drunk.

Here are the 7 “how dare you”s I noted in this book (there’s one more by Miss Huda but I’ll leave that out):

“How dare you,” she said. “You horrible cretin. You useless monster. How could you—” (Page 4)
“How dare you.” (Page 33)
“How dare you,” she said, her fists clenching. “How dare you slander my person when you know nothing about me—” (Page 102)
“How dare you,” she whispered. (Page 165)
“How dare you,” she said, drawing herself up to her full height, her fists clenching. “I am not pathetic—” (Page 235)
“I certainly will not listen to you— And how dare you call me stupid and infuriating—” (Page 237)
She gasped. “I am not a demented Jinn, how dare you—” (Page 357).

Anyway, the remaining 1% in Alizeh’s POV isn’t even the plot. It’s just revelations explaining why Cyrus did what he did and a little more on Alizeh’s identity as a Jinn. So yeah, basically nothing happened in the 200+ pages of her POV. The story didn’t move forward, there was no character development — in fact, all I saw was character deterioration. And God, the romance was disgusting (not saying the one she had with Kamran wasn’t problematic). I don’t know how anyone could think someone cleaning blood off another’s face with their tears could be a touching, much less swoon-worthy act cause this is ‘bombastic side eye, criminal offensive side eye' territory.

The actual aforementioned 1% plot happened in Kamran’s POV where the story blessedly moved forward. Even more astonishing is that character development happened for Kamran! He’s no longer the complete asshole he was and he even became more mature. I couldn’t see why some reviewers said he was annoying since he’s the sole reason I continued reading this sequel instead of DNFing it (and also the sole cause of the singular star I’m rating this sequel). Seriously, Alizeh was just so irritating, so sickening, so ‘oh-woe-is-me‘ despite how she could’ve saved herself with how OP she is. It was such a chore reading her perspective that I skipped chunks and chunks and chunks of non-dialogue, repetitive, navel-gazing paragraphs.

Also, I didn’t think it was possible but the purple prose got even more purple than the first book — and at this point, it’s no longer bearable. It’s simply obnoxious, pretentious and wasteful. Everything in this book could’ve happened in less than 200 pages, maybe even within 100 pages!

As much as I like Kamran now, I’m not going to bother picking up the next book just to find out what happens. Alizeh is too major ick for me to handle.

Thank you so much Pansing for sending me a copy of this in exchange for an honest review! These Infinite Threads by Tahereh Mafi is available at all good bookstores.
 
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