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gillygild2342 's review for:
Thief of Night
by Holly Black
challenging
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
This one was OK. I do feel like the end dragged on far too long especially considering at the 90% mark Holly Black did the equivalent of that sound on TikTok where it’s like “now we need to rob the bank without them, knowing we robbed the bank. And then you accidentally grab another page and the bank exploded dollar bills right down from the sky like blah blah blah”. Because after that point there’s an additional couple of chapters that just seemed to drag it out and I was reading solely to complete the book. I didn’t actually particularly care about how it ended.
I still liked Charlie and found her humor very dry and fun at times which I appreciated. her relationship with her sister got pretty contentious for seemingly no reason, but then we kind of figure it out at the end, but it’s still it felt like Holly Black was trying to make the story more intricate and detailed by just not telling you details instead of setting it up so that she could feed you small pieces and maybe you could put it together. Red/Vincent/Remi/Carver story was sad and I particularly did not enjoy, but felt for him, when we discovered what Adeline had done growing up and was still trying to do. And his conditioning to be submissive and obedient at all times, regardless of what he felt or wanted was incredibly hard to take. The main mystery/conflict of this book trying, to solve who did the massacre at that church felt disjointed, which echoes back to the main “mystery“ of book of night.
This is a small stupid thing to complain about, but if you’re going to be writing an adult fantasy novel and have there be sex scenes I think it’s expected to be a bit more descriptive instead of sort of chickening out and shying away from actually describing what’s going on. It’s not like this was a YA book. This is marketed and tagged as an adult novel. I am glad this is a duology because I do not have the interest or desire to read another book in the series if it were a trilogy.
We never got the answers to who exactly was Rose, especially the answer to did Remi care for Rose and why. There was never a replacement for knight Singh on the Cabal and I still wonder what was the tipping point for shadow Magic becoming a known entity in the world. Also, is Charlie still the hierophant? And if so, are they just not attaching another shadow to her? isn’t that the trademark of being the hierophant? Is what mahar suggested the way to quicken your shadow? And the entire scenario of if Mr. punch was supposed to be at that event or not, and when he was showing up and then how he found out he was being impersonated did not make sense. Also, what happened to Posey‘s shadow after she took on Charlie’s?
Also, that big plot twist that’s unexpected at the 90% mark felt again disjointed because at that point Charlie had solved a couple of mysteries and was at this event to save shadows, but then this character shows up and his motivations had nothing to do with the rest of the book or what Charlie had been looking into. Then once we get past all of that and we’re in the dragged out ending Charlie is separated from red inexplicably and their reunion is very quick and also chopped up along an entire evening, seemingly to set up for another book, but I do believe this is the last of the series.