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signofwolf · 3 years ago

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Crown of Shards series by Jennifer Estep

Genre: High Fantasy, Adult Fantasy, Sword and Sorcery

Themes: Royalty, Gladiators, Magic, Conspiracy, Spies

Containing: Kill the Queen (2018) Star rating: 8/10 Protect the Prince (2019) Star rating: 7/10 Crush the King (2020) Star rating: 4/10 Series star rating: 6/10

Why did I pick this up? Badass titles (and that’s a completely valid reason!)

Character design Lady Everleigh Saffira Winter Blair. It doesn’t exactly read as Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, but it’s close. Our main protagonist is a standard model Hero-1: orphaned, overlooked, average at everything. At this point I’m not even sure it can be counted as a flaw, there are really A LOT of fiction works to compare. What I liked about her was her funny attitude towards everything and the relationships she created around herself. I really appreciated the fact that she was a fully grown, 28 years old woman. It made her perspective a lot more interesting and appealing from the point of accumulated life experiences, which our standard sweet sixteen just lacks. Her past in Seven Spires is not consistent enough to be fully believable. I’ve got the feeling that J. Estep was juggling Evie’s past to suit the plot. Not cool, author, not cool indeed.

The rest of the cast… was awesome. Cho’s cheerfulness and love for sweets, Serilda's harshness and history, Jenna’s charming personality and not-so-charming growth, Zanya‘s slyness, Paloma’s loyalty. Lucas Sullivan actually became a full-fledged character by the second installment. And that’s completely fine, it got the pacing and time for friendships and loyalties first.

...and in the last book they all turned into a uniform mass called ‘my friends’. RIP good character design.

Romance The real problem is that there shouldn’t be a romance in Kill The Queen, because there wasn’t any on the pages till the ‘we want, but we can’t’ moment. And it's not that I didn’t buy that Evie and Sullivan could fall in love, they totally could, but that was a book about intrigues, mass murder and path to be strong. The last minute love interest just wasn’t necessary ... It was so disconnected, that my theory is that the editor decided that the book without love wouldn’t sell so it got written in later.. The romantic plotline in the second book was actually very good, but as it lacked grounds that should’ve been formed in the previous volume it rang hollow for me.

World Building My opinion after the 1st book: Pretty standard, competent, but not earth-shattering.

My opinion after the 3rd book: It’s a mess.

We have the ‘every jewel has a different power if infused with magic’ world base. That’s great, I loved it. But the only thing we get to know is what power each gem has, and my very loose guess that only stone master can make magical jewels. Which is sadly lacking when taking into consideration that our protagonist worked for 15 years as stone masters’ apprentice. She should share a bit of this knowledge with us, otherwise: what was the point?

We have individual powers of humans, which are more or less genetically based. And that’s an even bigger mess than the whole ‘magical gems’ thingy (a similar concept was handled great by Victoria Aveyard in Red Queen). And then there are races of morphs (ogres and dragons shapeshifters) who at the same time are and aren't humans. I think? I’ll go with not-humans because they have a living tattoo of their inner self, and that's a consistent feature, but through the books they were treated like any other power.

We have 3 types of magical creatures, which live only in 3 kingdoms (the remaining 4 are not worthy?): gargoyles, stryxes and caladriuses. They (or at least some of them) have a lot of internal magic and can talk (only sometimes or only to special people and to books’ protagonists).

The magic can be ingested by drinking blood of the creatures from the previous point, but only one person can? Only one person realized this? This point is on the nitpicking side, but it’s a problem when the world isn’t built consistently. As an example let me say that I’m not even sure about my feelings about the existence of a train in this universe. It could be explained by magic-powered thingy, but it was the only steampunk vibe in the whole book and it was dropped so casually that it didn’t feel real.

And these things wouldn't be that bad if so much spotlight wouldn’t be put on them only to repeat the same few phrases every time.

Language REPETITIONS.

Phrase ‘executed perfect Bellonian curtsy’ was overused to the point of physical pain. I’m a little sad that I don’t have an e-book copy to check an actual number. I’m fairly sure that this was more than 10 times per book.‘As did a dragon on her(/his) neck’ isn’t nearly as nerve grating, but still too much. All books have a terrible number of repeated phrases or specific words, often not needed at all (the author said that the ogre ‘tattoo’ almost always mirrors the mimics of the person, WHY then inform us every time what the ogre did if we already knew what the person did?! That's actually the second reason why these books are not 5 stars.

Almost every time the author described the things the same way, e.g. stryxes were always ‘bigger than floresyan(?) horses’. And, yeah that’s lovely. But the next 5 times I would like to read something different about them, or nothing at all. For example information that they just molted, that would be a worldbuilding piece! …and isn’t it sad, what it tells about worldbuilding?

Plotlines: Series have two main plotlines: The coup/war plotline - that was a good one. The Evie/Winter Queen plotline - that was not a good one.

All across these books there is this great mystery: What is a Winter Queen? And you know what? After reading the whole series I have no idea what a Winter Queen is.

The whole Winter/Summer Queen deal is a chaos so great it should create some kind of new world. Oh wait… I would really love to understand this Gordian knot of inconsistent explanations, but as for now I’m not sure if even the author herself understands this. The only thing I, as a reader, can do is to list facts we were presented in the plot, yet I’m not even trying to find logic or links between them.

So what do we know about the meaning of being a Winter Queen? There are basically 3 possibilities:

Winter Queen is something genetic. There were two bloodlines in one family, so this suggests something genetic on a level of biology or magic, but the information we have about Blairs contradicts this. How do they even decide who is from which line? Vasilia and Evelyn were second cousins, but one was Winter and one was Summer, does that mean thet their Great-grandparents tossed a coin to decide which daughter will be from which bloodline? So how did it look before? Any suggestions, dear autor?

Winter Queen is a special power (Magic Master) The most logical solution, which for the time I thought was correct, was if a Winter Queen was a magic master, like The First Queen and later Evie. But why then her mother was considered a Winter Queen when her power was ice? It would make the individuals special, not a branch of a family, but through the whole Kill the Queen everyone talked about ‘Winter side of the family’.

This theory is supported by the attempted kidnapping of Evie by Morta. But on the other hand King of Morta admitted that he didn’t believe in ‘magic master legend’ so all this sequence just doesn't make any sense. Well, unless the author wanted to upped the stakes, but she writted her protagonist too normal childhood.

Winter Queen is what the author explained it as at the end of Crush The King The official ‘explanation’ is that it's a ‘queen who cares about her people’ (WTF?) and a ‘queen who rules in the hard times’ which was just a big pile of bull’s sh*t. And that’s putting it mildly. Although to be fair that is the explanation that fits the main rhyme of the series the best. The problem here are all the scenes and dialogues across the books that said otherwise.

You can have at the same time ‘a special Chosen One, first after the founder’, ‘the last survivor of a special clan’ and ‘special, because she made herself special’.

The Villain book #1: Yup, buying it. She just lacks a little in the backstory department. Don’t get me wrong Vasilia is a very compelling antagonist, she just lacks these long-term snippets of life, to explain why and how. In here it looked just as if she was born a selfish, cruel b*tch. That’s where Azula from Avatar: The Last Airbender comes as a prime example of the perfect unfinged-bloodthirsty-princess story, but with a very realistic reasoning.

The Villain books #2 & #3: Maximus – cartoonishly evil villain created to make Maven ‘a lesser evil’.Maven – very good character, layered with a good reason to exist.

What I loved in Kill The Queen

The plot. The plot was great

The coup scene was a masterpiece. I think that it was even better than The Red Wedding.

The rhyme, it was repeated often, but the mood-setting was good enough for it to be compelling. “Summer queens are fine and fair, with pretty ribbons and flowers in their hair. Winter queens are cold and hard, with frosted crowns made of icy shards,” *Although I’m not buying the explanation for it (look section Plotlines)

The nice touch was every book structure: rhyme, first and last sentence.

What I didn’t like:

The problem of overexplaining everything at the start of the series. Exposition is a b*tch.

Evie was making a lot of introspective decisions. In most cases that’s something good, but in Kill The Queen she made a decision ‘to be better, stronger’ on an equivalent at least 4 times. That was too much to make an impact. All this self-reevaluation and her reminiscence about her relationship with Vasilia should theoretically be good, but it reads as a second draft. I wouldn’t call it though not thoroughly enough but there was too much repetition and slight contradictions to be a smooth narration. It also made the middle part of the first book not as dynamic as it should be. And the issue of pacing is one of the main reasons why these books are not top notch.

The subtle like punch in the face teasing of Paloma origins. A punch with brass knuckles.

The scene when Evie was kidnapped as a child (the whole idea really). But specifically this ominous, totally fake discussion of mercenaries with Maven in the last of Evie’s memories. It was so bad that it deserves a special spot on this list

Conclusions

These could be very good books, if it got more input from an editor or just if the author just reread it all after putting it down for a week.

The WInter Queen plotline was a sham.

Definitely didn’t like the unfinished motives: Zanya and Paloma deserved better. Why put so much light on Serilda and Cho not-romance if we won't be rewarded with a conclusion of their relationship.

The open-ending that was actually good, was the Maven and Leonidas one, it made sense, and I would totally read a spin-off ...if someone different would write it.

Unofficial Consort, really? You can eat cake or have cake, not both. Again.

Clash the King disappointed me a lot, and almost completely destroyed my good opinion about this series.

This review is a mess of me writing it when reading books and then being unable to put it into a coherent form. But to be fair these books are really a mess, with good start, but a mess nevertheless.

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#jennifer estep #crown of shards #book review #bookworm #fantasy #fiction #high fantas #magic #book #ya fantasy #female prota #art #digital art #fanart #girl #queen #prince

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signofwolf · 3 years ago

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Kingdom of Ash by Sarah J. Maas – book review

Series: Throne of Glass #7 Genre: YA, Fantasy Theme: Fae, magic users, war Warnings: mentions of torture, imprisonment Star rating: 0,5/10

Why did I pick this up?: I wanted to end this horrible series once and for all.

[Heavy spoilers ahead]

To make myself clear, before this book I quite liked this series. It wouldn’t place in my top 100 books, not even close, but it was a pleasant pageturner to listen to in audiobooks when working.

Language

Let’s start slow. I lack the words to express how much I hate the words ‘male’, ‘female’ and ‘mate’ after this series. Not even gonna try to express my trauma. But these 3 gems aside, Sarah J. Maas needs a dictionary. Or compress her work to a manageable size. Everything sang, Everyone melted, Every man roared, Every woman trembled, Everyone was unleashing themselves at least once a chapter (number of chapters: 122) ). And now I know definitely too much about Yrene’s ‘womb’. I know so much…

Dynamism

I thought that was a book about a war with heavy action content. Oh boy, I was wrong. This 984-pages monstrosity has maybe 5 pages of action. If you squint.

Every sequence, where by design action should take place was followed by one of two scripts:

Few sentences of action and then a few pages long internal monologue. Often repeated with the same character after the next few sentences of action, or with the next character and then the next (sometimes the first character made a second appearance and then everything would go all over again). And the word ‘character’ used in these sentences is not because I’m rambling. This book is written that way!

Few sentences of action and then action stops, and we are graced by a few pages long conversation. In the middle of a battle. Or spying. Or in Erawan’s chambers, when his castle is going down, and he is running up the stairs...

Time

Leaving alone the fact that apparently all series took less than a year (till this book I estimated the plot for about 3 years, Wiki told me it was 2, but Maas knows best), because that is a can of worms in itself. Time in this one? I honestly have no idea. There were many ‘few weeks of travel’ parts with two main groups of POVs. Personally my only time indicator was ‘Orynth won’t fall till Aelin gets here’. But nothing just fit. And I saw Lost Song when in the last episode we as the audience realized that our two POVs parallel storylines are in reality millennia apart. Lost Song made sense.

Emotional loading

… there wasn’t any. Really, it was like reading a milk label. Every time the scene was potentially emotionally impactful, Maas went ahead to overexplaining EVERY. GOD. DAMMED. THING. And it was abso-fucking-lutely everything. ‘Emotional dilemma? Let’s current POV explain it! 2 pages should be enough… Damn maybe it wasn’t enough. I know! I’ll switch POVs and explain it through the other character!’ <= My impression of Maas’ thought process. I’m fairly sure that the record was 7 POVs explaining the same thing in the row, but I was blacking out a little, so I cannot be sure.

And if that wasn’t enough, this book had a second way to defuse tension: random-plastic-repetitive-badly_written-smut. Really badly written and really repetitive. How could you not feel the spicy bits, when Manon (cruel, self assured 100+years old witch-queen) reacts the same in bed as Elide (20years old, virgin, ex-slave). And the rest of them were the same, there weren’t ANY distinctions.Just copy-paste.

The next point in current case: Someone died, it was impactful, I really liked the character, so I got sad. But then 2 of our characters came out of the room with a body, and after a paragraph of grieving they started making out, and then I was regaled with 2-pages-long description of melting cores. That was the place then this book stopped being badly written, and started being distasteful.

Characters

Remember when I was writing about switching POVs (which is 15(!!!) In the whole book. Oh and an omniscient narrator in places when our current POV was grieving too much to overthink something, but Maas still wanted to inform us about something)? They were all savagely murdered in the worst way: character mutilation. Somewhere between books our maybe-not-that-original but colorful and interesting characters became carbon copies of each other. I have no idea how many times I didn’t realise there was a POV switch. The only indicator was a change of pronoun, or when Maas was telling us the name of a current narrator. These were the only ways. And if you can't distinguish if you are in Dorian’s head or in Manon’s, that is the sign of a really BAD writing.

Romance

…there wasn't any. In all this book there wasn't any naturally progressing romantic scene. There were Maas’ endgame pairings which were sexing or pinning. As the author Maas loves to write about soulmates. And it’s not a bad thing itself. When I want some fluffy story I often tag ‘soulmates’ in AO3 and voila, +10 to good mood. But God above, it is not cute when every pair you write about are ‘true mates’ just BECAUSE. It is the only way Maas sees a relationship, as a fated pairing, written in the wake of the universe by the God himself. There is no choice, nor the work to put in it. They are the author's OTP and that means that they are perfect and they should have children right now. Point in case:

Guy was treating a girl like a shit on his sole, including throwing her naked out of tent, on a snow, with their friends present, all the while abusing her verbally in a worst way. But it’s okay, because when she almost died he realised his mistakes and apologised. Two scenes later, he was forgiven, because... fated mates?

The pathos

I know that many people don't like this type of scenes, but it's not my case. I’m reading by picturing images and not repeating words. I like sequences that I can imagine to be grand and glorious, even if they are a little corny. That said, the pathos scenes were the most disappointing ones for me. Maas likes to write parts that are more picturesquely exalted than logically possible [point in case: meeting of 5 armies/forces in the random patch of sand in Empire of Storms, and it being painted as ‘an Aelin’s great plan’. I laughed myself silly at that. But not taking logic and all the plot holes into consideration that was a nicely looking scene. In Kingdom of Ash that wasn’t the case. I would say that the author wanted to paint us a renaissance painting every 20 pages or so. In my opinion, every time she failed miserably. Each and every of those scenes was or to farfetched to be even remotely realistic, and evidently written only for a sake of the picture, or just plainly stupid.

Example, and it’s so priceless a scene, that I just need to share it: Battle of Orynth, 25th day or so (time in this book doesn’t exist), the 13. sacrificed themselves (like thousands before them but hush). And then, time stops: grieving Manon is going through the city, they open the gates for her (yes, the siege is still on), she goes to the place where they died, after her come out all of our main heroes, and half the city itself with ‘flowers, rocks and precious possessions’ and they lay it there in a tribute to these brave (evil till 2 months ago) witches. I honestly can’t remember when was the last time I saw such an abstract scene. It’s a material for an essay in itself. No, I could not take it seriously.

Additionally, it's hard to make an impact as every damn sentence is grand and lofty. In the end it became truly pathetic, Aelin vs Maeve was unreadable.

Character deaths:

Let's make a quick count: main characters in a series at the start of KoA: 12 secondary characters in a series at the start of KoA: 20ish minor and total background: a lot more

Death count: main: 0 secondary: 3 minor: 2 (11 if we try very hard)

Resurrections: 1 (possibly 3, but not gonna analyze it)

Did you feel emotions of this impossible war against this all-encompassing, all-powerful, invincible, immortal, cunning Evil with armies from 3 continents and 2 worlds? No? Me neither.

Oh well, but there were a lot of deaths of ordinary soldiers. I’m quite certain that all of Terrasen’s army was at least twice brought back to life for them to die in these numbers.

Logic or lack thereof

Oh, and let’s not forget about the Deus ex machina army of unbeatable, magical elves on wolves, from legends, living for the past thousands of years in the unreachable lands of the north, because they managed to run from the surprise attack 10 years earlier. Did I mention that they came from portals, which the whole book was telling us were impossible to make in this scenario? After the previous saviour army was already fighting there for a day? And that Aelin didn’t know they would come for sure (how did she contact them again?)? Even though they were waiting in the full armours for these portals? Ah, and also: that army didn’t do anything. They just came and fought for maybe 4 minutes. And there were just so many things like that!

And if we’re on the topic of armies I present you: ‘My favourite absurd-list in the series: allied armies’.

(As a comparison, in A Song of Ice and Fire by J.R.R Martin, in 7 kingdoms of Westeros, at the peak of war there were 7 forces present, but not all were even engaged in a war.)

First the ones that made sense:

Armies of Terrasen’s Lords (counted as one, not gonna nitpick)

The Khaganate army (also counted as one)

Galan Ashryver’s armada

Whitethorn fraction

Rebel Ironteeth witches

…should Dorian be counted as an ‘army’?

And there were some that did not:

Ansel of Briarcliff’s army

The Silent Assassins

Mycenians

Wild Men of the Fangs

Army of magical elves on wolves

And the ‘I don’t even know’ category:

Crochan witches

Overpowering and overreaching

Section title tells it all. The stakes were too high. I was honestly waiting for Aelin to become Super Saiyan and start to throw planets at Maeve and Erawan. I won’t spoil if this happened.

In my opinion it could be a really great series, if our list of villains ended with Arobynn and King of Adarlan, and the list of Aelin titles with an assassin and a princess. We could have had two main fight plots: one emotional with Arobynn, when Aelin would have to face a damage he had done to her, and overcome it. And the second one, with freeing Terrasen from Adarlan’s rule. That’s it. There was an asshole, power hungry king, who feared magic and wanted to rule the East part of a continent. A lot of plot, but not so much that we stopped to care, or didn’t have time to cover everything. We could really get to know what Terrasen and his people were like and not JUST GET TOLD that it was ‘the greatest place in the world’ every damn 20 pages.

Plus…should Dorian be counted as an ‘army’? It's a REALLY valid question.

Climaxes

IIf I have to write a list of things that disappointed me in this book, this review would be thrice its current size, but one of the worst grievances I have is the complete lack of acknowledging the plotlines that had been started. This book series has overall 4 372 pages (not counting novellas) and 12 main characters (still not gonna address this). All of them had their storylines and arcs but if they weren't tied up in the previous instalments they wouldn’t be in this one. I get it, Maeve and Erawan got beaten (in an extremely unsatisfactory way) but they were only a background in this series' plots.

Aelin Well, Aelin was one of 3 people (+2 paragraf-long insertion from Nesryn and Chaol) who got their own POV’s after the battle (second was technically Rowan, who was ‘Aelin’s POV outside of Aelin’.The third Dorian, who got almost a full two pages). And from this we got that: she got crowned, Aedion got his bond and that Maas have no idea how the city looks after weeks of siege. In her case what angered me the most was ‘Terrasen is my home’ subplot. Only in this tome we read at least 3 times that Aelin will be okay with dying, if only she gets to see Terrasen one last time, or if she get to die on Terrassen soil. But you know what? Maas forgot to write the scene where Aelin actually ‘comes in’.

Mannon Didn't get her own POV after the battle, but here’s what we’ve got: She is going to the Wastes with Croachans and Ironteeth. Whait. What? Yes, that was the ending of this 500+ years of feud. They fought together and they decided to unite their two species, completely forgetting more than half a millenia of slaughter. I can only hope that there were at least some talks behind the scenes… NO! F*** NO! This isn’t how it works!

Rowan, Dorian, Chaol, Yrene, Lysandra, Aedion, Lorcan, Elide, Nesryn, Sartaq Lived happily ever after

Secondary minor and total background characters Survived (I acknowledge that they would be ignored in most books’ epilogues, but this abomination is almost 1000 pages of nothing!!).

Good Scenes

That saying, this book actually had 4 good scenes:

Crochan witches go to war - gathering-forces-to-fight trope, which is my *love-always trope* so I’m not even sure if it was relatively good, or if I’m just a slut for this trope. It was still only a paragraph long though.

[recurring] The children’s tale Aelin repeated to herself to remember who she is.

‘Lorcan Lochan’ - the only marginally funny scene in the whole book

I actually found Darrel making Evangeline his heir charming. Even if circumstances were far-fetched at least.

But the words crime of this book? It was agonisingly, mind-numbingly boring. If the overexplaining and repetitions were to be taken out I highly doubt that there would be 300 pages left.

For these 33 hours of audiobook I suffered through I give it half a star. Because Abraxos exist.

Please see my garishly accurate cover on my instagram! You can also like it there :D

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