Tower of Dawn - Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass #6)

Upon reading this book, I had to immediately go back to my reviews of former Throne of Glass books.  This is a strange volume--a book that was supposed to be a novella and ended up at nearly seven hundred pages, taking place concurrently with the prior book in the series, Empire of Storms.  In this, Maas tries to fill in the Chaol-shaped hole that was left in EoS, something that I had mentioned in my review of that book, but I was looking for something else.  The sentence fragments.  Dear lord, did the other books have these sentence fragments?  I don't seem to have mentioned them in my reviews, if they did, and I know I mentioned the use of this "convention" in another book that it drove me crazy in, The Rose and the Dagger.  Either way, whether they were used so blatantly in the other books or not, it is not an excuse, this is a terrible convention and should be abandoned.  Seriously.  The sentence fragments that run amok here continuously yanked me out of the story and had me pounding my head against my Kindle.  Seriously, Maas, did sentence subjects and verbs hurt you as a child?

Now, with that out of the way...

This book dumps Chaol and his traveling companion/kind-of-girlfriend Nesryn on the southern continent of the Throne of Glass world, in Antica, the city of thirty-six gods and the capital of an empire.  If you were looking for a foil to the white, European-based Adarlan, Antica is your answer to it.  With a variety of races and cultures, it's definitely different from Adarlan, in a good way.  Chaol is hoping that the healers who live on the southern continent can fix the paralysis caused by his injuries in the fight against Adarlan's king two books ago.  The healer he is assigned apparently hails from another novella, which I have not read--Yrene Towers.  She is, of course, the most talented and most beautiful healer evah.  While we're on the topic, is Antica not allowed to have people who are the best?  Yrene, from the north, is the best healer.  Nesryn, from the north--her father is from Antica, but Nesryn herself is from the north--is the best archer.  Our absent characters, Aelin and company, are the best at assorted other things.  No one in Antica is apparently the best, and if they are, I'm sure one of those northern characters will soon become interested in that skill and master it and be the best instead.  So, yes, maybe still some subtle racist contexts here.  Hmm...

Anyway.  Chaol gets a hot healer, and Nesryn gets a hot royal who rides a giant bird and thinks she's da bomb, so there goes that relationship.  At first I was onboard with the relationship swapping in this series; after all, few people in real life spend their entire lives with their first romantic partner.  But at this point...just get on with it already.  Anyway (again) Chaol and Nesryn soon split up, Nesryn going off in search of info on the menace that might have followed them to Antica and Chaol...staying put because he's paralyzed, which is a bummer for him, though of course the gorgeous Yrene helps to ease his sorrows.

Remember how Harry Potter spent the entire book in Half Blood Prince angsting over Sirius' death?  This is that book for Chaol.  Except, whereas Harry had faced a very real loss (even if it was still a bit overblown) Chaol was angsty over all kinds of things that, really, he just needed to get over and should have been over already.  This sounds extremely callous of me, I know.  And some of the things, yes, he could feel guilty over, even if they were not directly his fault.  But when the person who is literally going to restore your ability to walk tells you, "Hey, I can do this, but you need to work through what is holding you back.  I will help you do this, but you need to make the effort," and you still refuse to make the effort, well, you lose some of the sympathy factor.  And beyond the healing, there is really not much that goes on for Chaol in this book.  Nesryn only has slightly more action.  There's not a lot of pep in these pages.

Now.  This was not necessarily a bad book.  I liked aspects of it quite a bit--I did like Antica, and the ruks, and Yrene and the Tower.  It's just that this book, and this series, is getting a bit, well, tired.  Repetitive, if I dare say so.  There are only so many times you can try to throw in the same twist before people start calling it, and I saw all of them coming from a mile away--which does not bode well for the one volume remaining.  I'm betting it's going to be pretty much a direct copy of the finale of A Court of Wings and Ruin, because Maas' bread and butter seems to be presenting the same book again and again.  They have fun aspects; they are light and fast and enjoyable to read.  And this same critique could be said of many other authors and genres (romance, anyone?).  Buuuuut you can only write the same story so many times before you lose interest, you know?  Also, there are questions raised that I'm not sure Maas can properly answer at this point, because they seem to be running contrary to what has been set up in other books--like the whole spiders thing?  Why are they not allied in all kinds of different ways with the bad forces running about?  And Maeve?  Really?  That's the route you're taking?

Whatever.  I'm over it.

I'm in this for the long haul, I guess, since there's only one book left.  But it had better be a doozy, because I'm getting kind of tired of this.

2.5 stars out of 5.

Empire of Storms - S. J. Maas (Throne of Glass #5)

I feel like it's been forever since I've read a real fantasy novel, but it really hasn't been!  I read both The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate within the past few weeks, and Smoke and Blood Debt not too long before that.  But none of those are really the classic, sweeping sort of fantasy that the Throne of Glass series is, and I guess that's why Empire of Storms felt so refreshing--though the other books were by no means stale.

Empire of Storms is the fifth book in the Throne of Glass series.  By now we know that the King of Adarlan wasn't the Big Bad, it's actually Erawan, the Valg King, who was hiding out inside a duke's body until this point.  Aelin has also made her return to claim her crown as the Queen of Terrasen, and she and her crew know they're going to have down Erawan or the whole world of Erilea is going to be destroyed.  So, with all that in mind, this book does a couple of different things.

It features Aelin's return to Terrasen, which doesn't go very well, and her attempts to both stop Erawan and reclaim her crown.  Manon Blackbeak, our resident witch, struggles with the knowledge she's gained of what exactly is going on in Morath.  And Elide, who escaped from Morath at the end of the last book, attempts to find Aelin/Celaena to give her the Wyrdkey that Kaltain gave her, though Elide doesn't know exactly what it is she's carrying.  Along the way, all of those involved run into plenty of trouble, encounter new monsters, and forge new friendships/ally-ships to get them through.  Oh, and did I mention Maeve the Fae Queen might be up to something dastardly, too?

While I liked this overall, Maas did a few things that really annoyed me.  First, there's a Big Secret that comes out at the end about Aelin and Rowan.  Aelin has been doing things on the sly all along, so I was used to that, but we're typically keyed in about things the other characters are doing--so the fact that three characters other than Aelin knew what happened, and yet we were kept in the dark for it, was annoying.  It wasn't SHOCKING when this thing came out, though Maas clearly meant for it to be.  Instead, I was just irked that she decided to ditch her typical storytelling convention in an attempt to pull at our heartstrings.  And, I might add, not a very successful attempt; I think other parts of the book were far more dramatic and poignant than that.

Second, there is no Chaol in this book, so if you were hoping for Chaol, be prepared to be disappointed.  I expected to see some of Chaol and Nesryn (that was her name, right?) on the southern continent, getting Chaol better while attempting to win allies for Adarlan and Terrasen against Erawan.  That's pretty much where the end of Book 4 hinted at his story going.  But instead, there is a strange Chaol-shaped gap in the story.  Would having him have resulted in too many plots in too many directions?  Maybe... It's hard to say.  But it's very strange to suddenly have a character who was a prominent presence in the former 4 books of the series just suddenly not be there at all.

Third, more Elide and Lorcan, please!  This is kind of combined with another one, which is that apparently normal people aren't allowed to do interesting things in Maas' world?  Honestly, Aelin was a bit more interesting when she was Celaena, a mere mortal who used her wits and strength to change her path, than when she became a super-powered part-fae-whatever-she-is-now.  Even Elide doesn't get to be fully mortal, though she's the closest of the batch to being so.  At first having a few "supernatural" characters sprinkled in was fun...but it's getting old fast.  But specifically with Elide and Lorcan, I wanted more chapters with them.  Aelin and Rowan are clearly together for the long haul and are therefore no longer interesting at this point, so I wanted more of the new blossoming romance here.  (There are also other brewing pairings in Aelin's group, but Elide and Lorcan, off on their own, were far more interesting.)

Fourth, and finally (I'll talk about cool things in a minute), Maas has started really pulling in from the novellas that were published before the first book.  I don't really like this as an approach; little nods to short stories/novellas that tie in with a series are cool, but expecting people to track down and read them so they understand what's going on isn't.  At this point, if you haven't read the novellas, you're going to be pretty lost with some of the characters appearing and things goings on.  I have read the novellas, but it's very rare of me to do so, and I can see how frustrated I would have been if I had come to this book and then realized that there was a whole bunch of other stuff I had to read that hadn't been mentioned until this point, and hadn't been included in a main book in the series.

Okay, now for the stuff I liked!  I liked the writing, as usual--I think that Maas has really matured as a writer throughout this series, and this book is much better than the original Throne of Glass.  There were some very neat settings here, such as the introduction of the Stone Marshes and the re-introduction/introduction (depending on whether you read the novellas or not) of Skull's Bay.  Actually, the entire Skull's Bay sequence, including the big fight, was pretty cool, and was actually one of my favorite parts of the book.  It ends a little bit of a swashbuckling air to the story and is a nice change from the trekking overland we'd seen until this point.

Another interesting point was watching Aelin's growing network of connections.  I totally sympathize with Aedion and wanting to punch her in the face for not telling anyone what was going on, but also understand her reasoning--which Aedion does too, eventually.  All of those connections that Aelin has made in the past are now coming back to help her, and it's the continuation of her actually becoming someone worthy of the title '"Queen."  I'm glad she didn't actually grab her crown right away upon returning to Terrasen, because this fight has made her a continually more compelling character.  Do I like where this book left off with her?  Well... I'm just kind of "meh" about it.  I've moved on to other favorite characters by now, and I think it would actually be kind of of interesting to see how they would fight back if the great and powerful Aelin fell.  But the inclusion of the flashback parts, and the new knowledge of Elena, was very interesting, too.  And I loved how Maas finally tied Manon's storyline more completely into the main one.

Overall, I think there is a lot to like about this one, but there are a few things that just didn't seem to fit that drag it down from a most-excellent rating.  All those things considered, I'm giving this 3.5 stars, but I'm hopeful for the final volume...though I'm unsure of how Maas is going to wrap it all up.

Queen of Shadows - Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass #4)

So, as you can find in my reviews or pretty much anywhere else on the internet that deals in book reviews, the Throne of Glass series got off to a rough start.  Throne of Glass introduced us to hidden princess/kick-butt assassin Celaena Sardothien, who despite being entered into a competition to fight for her life spent most of her time playing piano, wearing pretty dresses, and eating sweets that just appeared in her room.  You know, despite the fact that people wanted her dead...  There were some cool fantasy aspects to it, but overall it was rather lackluster.  However, the general consensus has been that the series has drastically improved over time--and I have to agree.

The third book in the series, Heir of Fire, ended with Celaena (now known by her real princess/queen name of Aelin, by which I will refer to her from now on) heading back to Adarlan after gaining control over her magical abilities in the realm of Wendlyn and getting a kick-butt blood-sworn fae companion in the form of Rowan.  Now, Aelin is actually back, and she has a list of things to accomplish.  First, she needs to rescue her cousin Aedion from certain death.  Second, she needs to get back a Wyrdkey which is currently in possession of her former master, Arobynn Hamel, the King of Assassins.  Third, she needs to either save or kill Dorian, who has been possessed by a demon, courtesy of his father.  Fourth, she needs to free magic, and kill the king, and...uh, list keeps going on.  But Aelin is now equipped to handle it, with or without magic, because of the events of Heir of Fire.  She's now a heroine who I can actually root for, and a heroine who very obviously starts to become not just an assassin or a lost princess, but a queen.

Meanwhile, the Blackbeak witch Manon is going out of her mind with frustration and boredom in Morath, where she and her witches await orders.  But as they wait, sinister things start to arise at Morath--things that impact the witches.

Queen of Shadows is a book in which things come together.  Manon and Aelin encounter each other, Rowan comes to Adarlan, Chaol and Aelin must work together once again, and Aelin's path to reclaiming her realm starts to become clear.  But that doesn't mean that everything is resolved.  Nope.  In fact, Maas drops a real bombshell at the climax of the book, revealing that all of the troubles up until this point have only really been the tip of the iceberg.  I have mixed feelings about this, because on one hand, it's very cool and very clear that things are about to go to hell in a handbasket quite quickly from here on out.  But on the other hand, I think that revelation could have pretty much been cut out, along with the bits about what's going on in Morath, and we still could have had a pretty satisfying conclusion to the series.

Now, the other thing that bothered me about this book: the ending dragged so much.  The last ten or so chapters all seemed like they could have been satisfying final chapters for this book, but they just kept on appearing.  Every character needed two or three chapters to wrap up what happened to them, which seemed excessive.  I think some of those could have easily been trimmed, or maybe shifted to the start of the next book instead.  As it was, I kept thinking the book was over, but it wasn't, and it kind of soured the end a bit for me.  It's like with the movie Lincoln.  You know, that amazing shot where he puts on his hat and walks down the White House stairs to go off to see the performance at Ford's Theater, that shot that would have been such a lovely, dignified ending, because we all know what happened afterward.  But that shot wasn't the ending: it then had to go on for another then minutes of his kid screaming and shots of him dead on a bed, which were completely unnecessary because it wasn't a movie about Lincoln's assassination.  This book was like that.  It was great, until the end, which then just went on way too long.

Finally, let me briefly speak about Rowan and Aelin, who seem to be a point of some contention among Throne of Glass fans.  I like Rowan.  He is awesome.  I totally support him and Aelin (Though that kiss at the end; what?  You built it all up for just THAT?).  That said, I still like Chaol and I don't hate the idea of him and Aelin together (this is the other main pairing right now, guys) but I do see how they have some serious issues with each other at this point, issues that are going to take two more books to resolve in their entirety if they can be resolved.  Right now, Aelin and Rowan seem like a more solid pair, connected as they are, though it'll be interesting to see how/if Maas resolves the whole "one is immortal and one isn't" thing if they stay together.  That said, I'm not placing all my bets on it, because Aelin has had three love interests in four books so far (and a fourth in the prequel novellas) and I wouldn't be surprised if something happened to introduce another suitor into the fray--though so far most blatant love triangles have been avoided, which I appreciate.

Overall?  A solid book.  It went on a bit too long past the climax, making the ending seem really interminable, but the story itself was great.  Things kept tying back into each other, and more very cool worldbuilding bits were brought up--the bones of the god of truth, anyone?  Still, I think it would have been easy for the series, with a few modifications, to end here, and while I'm sure the final two books will be good, I'm hoping that continuing this storyline doesn't end up being something we regret.

4 stars out of 5.

Heir of Fire - Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass #3)

I have to admit, Sarah J. Maas surprised me with this one.

At first, I thought I was going to hate Heir of Fire.  The book starts with heroine Celaena, an unstoppable assassin and secret princess, yadda yadda yadda, basically reduced to the status of a drunk wallowing in her own self-pity.  This is not a flattering depiction, obviously, and since Celaena spent most of the first two books in the series entrenched in a "woe is me" act, I was convinced that I was about to see an escalation of it on a massive scale.  This did not hold much appeal to me, and I actually put the book aside for a bit to read something else because I was so frustrated.  But I've always thought that Celaena's story as a whole had a lot of potential, even if the girl herself was pretty much insufferable, so I went back and started reading again.  And what do you know?  I liked it.

Heir of Fire finds Celaena in Wendlyn, the continent across the ocean from Adarlan.  She's been sent there to kill the royal family and find a way for Adarlan to invade through Wendlyn's supposedly-impenetrable barrier reefs.  Instead, she has decided to wallow in her self-pity for not being able to save her friend and her country and all of the stuff that happened in her childhood and Crown of Midnight.  But then!  But then Rowan, a Fae under the orders of Celaena's many-times-great-aunt Maeve, the Fae queen, shows up and drags Celaena off to meet Maeve herself, who tells Celaena she'll answer her questions, but only once Celaena proves herself worthy by mastering her magical abilities.  Maeve sweeps off, and Rowan starts trying to whip Celaena into shape.  For the most part, this is not an interesting process (which is probably why Maas bulked it out with all the other story lines) but the idea behind it is fascinating, because this is where I think Celaena actually started to become a likable character.  It's like Maas realized how insufferable Celaena was and spent the later half of Crown breaking her down so that, in Heir, she could rebuild her.

Granted, this isn't an entirely successful rebuilding.  When I finally got to the deep, dark thing that Celaena swears will make her snap if she faces it, I was left going, "Huh?  That's it.  Lame.  So many worse things have happened to you, and you've done so many worse things yourself, and that's your dark secret?"  She certainly still has her whiny, bitchy moments, her extreme pettiness that hurts the people around her for really no reason at all.  But for the most part, I think Celaena has actually become a character with potential and who can carry a story all on her own, without the need of a cast of characters supporting her every action--a transformation that was necessary because she was the only main character in Wendlyn.  Everyone else was still back in Adarlan.

Let's talk about those Adarlan people for a minute.  We have Chaol and Dorian, of course, at odds after the events of the second book, but we also have three new characters: Manon, the heir of the Blackbeak clan of Ironteeth witches; Aedion, Celaena's cousin who is now one of the King of Adarlan's prized generals; and Sorcha, a healer who works in the palace.  As things begin to unravel and wind together at the same time, we learn that Manon's job of becoming a wyvren rider, along with the rest of the Ironteeth witches (who were very cool in general) might be revealing her to have more of a heart and conscience than she would like to admit; that Aedion isn't all that she appears; and that Dorian isn't still hopelessly hung up on Celaena, which was nice to see.  I like when characters have relationships that don't work out, and move on to other people, because that's how life is.  In the first two books of this series, I really felt that these other characters were the people who made the story likable in the face of Celaena's awfulness; now, however, I found them to be, overall, pretty boring, and I always wanted to skip ahead to see how Celaena's transformation was going instead.  There were some intriguing bits in Adarlan, mostly at the end, but the Adarlan-based stories weren't nearly as compelling as the process of Celaena actually becoming a heroine.

I also think that this book could have ended about fifty pages sooner, total.  There were some really dull denouement bits at the end for all the story lines, and while some interesting things happened, I think they could have been backed up into the earlier parts of the book and the boring bits chopped without it really suffering any damage at all.  I guess Maas didn't want to leave readers with a cliffhanger, which I respect because cliffhangers are the worst, but I think it could have been worked out to have a conclusion, if maybe an implied one, without all the outright revelations at the end.

Still, I think this book was much stronger than the first two on the basis of Celaena alone.  The story greatly diverged from the Fictionpress version here (which made me a little sad, because I liked poor crazy Cindrillion, who dressed her mice and bird friends by breaking their limbs so that they'd fit into the clothes she made them; disturbing, yes, but also an interesting Cinderella dynamic) but I understand why Maas is going farther and farther away from the draft, still taking a few key things that happened but weaving what's pretty much an entirely new story from them.

I just wonder if the ending will be the same...

4 solid stars out of 5.

A Court of Thorns and Roses - Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses #1)

I'm a Sarah J. Maas hipster, by which I mean that I liked her before it was cool to like her, back when she had a real doorstop of a book called Queen of Glass posted on Fictionpress.com.  That doorstop is now the best-selling Throne of Glass series.  After reading the first one, I found that I didn't like it as much as I had the original draft, which was much darker (at least in my memory) and, while A Court of Thorns and Roses looked beautiful, I was leery about reading it because I didn't want to be disappointed again.  But then a friend read it and gave it four stars, and so up to the top of my list it went.  And was I disappointed?  No.  No I was not.

The plot follows Feyre, a human girl who is spirited off to the faerie realm of Prythian after she kills a faerie wolf one winter day.  In Prythian, she lives on the estate of Tamlin, a High Fae lord with the power of shapeshifting into the form of a beast.  Feyre aches to return to her village and her family, whom she promised to care for, but slowly becomes sucked into the world of Prythian and into Tamlin's life.  But when a magical blight threatens Prythian and everything beyond it, Feyre is both terribly out of her depth and the world's only hope for stopping the blight before it destroys everything.

A Court of Thorns and Roses is supposedly based off of Beauty and the Beast, and I can see that; however, I think it falls in more closely with another fairytale, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, which features a more active heroine.  In fact, Thorns and Roses reminded me of a lot of my favorite books: the faerie world, so beautiful and terrible, of Holly Black's Tithe, the overall plot structure of Dennis L. McKiernan's Once Upon a Winter's Night (STRONG resemblance there), the same "mortal falls in love with immensely powerful immortal" vibe as N. K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and an overall feel like that of Kristin Cashore's Graceling and Rae Carson's Girl of Fire and Thorns.  This was a very good thing, because it meant I really liked this book.  Did I absolutely love it?  Well...not quite.  For most of the book, I did.  But I felt like the ending left something to be desired.  It's obviously sequel-bait, and I have a nasty feeling that Maas is setting up the future books to include a love triangle, which I feel doesn't work well with the dynamic established in Thorns and Roses.   I found the plot setup and writing truly lovely, but that ending makes me dock a star.  I don't like eyeing future books with apprehension because of the way one ended, and that's exactly what happened here.  I don't feel like this quite ranked up there with Graceling and Girl of Fire and Thorns, but it was certainly very, very good.

4 stars out of 5.