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wutheringmights · 2 months ago

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I finished Skyshade by Alex Aster. No surprises: it's really bad. It might be the worst Lightlark book yet.

I could write out a long, well-articulated analysis of what specifically is bad about it, but I do not have the willpower. What I do have is a long, detailed summary of the events of the plot I spent way too much time writing out for my friends' personal enjoyment.

So here it is.

Ok so I am just going to assume that you all remember what happened at the end of Nightbane, because we pick up right where we left off: Isla "ending" the war by agreeing to go back to Nightshade with her husband Grim. The plot then informs me that apparently Grim's whole court and country knew they were married from the beginning. Taking into consideration the time they were married before the brain washing, the 100 day time limit on the centenial, and the month and a half of war prep we just went through; this means that this was somehow kept as a secret by thousands of people for like 6 whole months. How the fuck did no rumors about this ever spread to the rest of the world????

Anyway, what is the plot? So Isla has a prophecy that says that she is going to stab either Oro or Grim in the heart and kill them. That's bad, and she wants to stop that. But wait! She is also slowly dying (she's on borrowed time because her life is tied to Grim, via marriage). So she wants to find a way to not die. But wait! There are also storms. What kind of storms? Magical, uber desctructive storms that have apparently been destroying Nightshade and other countries for a long time now and have been slowly increasing in frequency. We have never been informed of the storms before, but now Isla has a goal of discovering the source of the storms and stopping them. And she has to do this before the end of storm season (winter, so a few weeks) because that's when she's supposed to die.

And here, we can truly acknowledge the fact that Aster knows how to write one plot and one plot alone: fetch quest with abritary time limit. The next 200-odd pages are Isla going to X person to find out Y, then running off to A person to ask more about B. And the narration is constantly reminding us that she only has a few short weeks to live, but it never feels that important-- frankly, because no one actually cares if she lives or dies or not.

So we go to a religious cult who once followed a prophet, who then tell her to go talk to the auger. The auger is a fucked up dude that sounds like he belongs in Pan's Labrynth. He will provide the needed info, but only if Isla pays him in human hearts. So now we need to go get human hearts.

During all this, is the… I guess romance stuff? So Grim is well aware he's in the fucking dog house with the whole brainwashing and marriage stuff, and this man has been groveling for her forgiveness. This is not fun for me, as I enjoy Grimshaw the best when he is an unrepentant asshole. He also does this thing where he keeps calling Isla, "wife." Which proves that the most important part of calling someone "my wife" is the "my" part. "My wife" is affectionate. "Wife" is like you're calling for a dog. Gives me the ick, I tell you. Anyway, everyone at court hates Isla because they think she's Oro's spy and is just using Grim. They're not wrong about the latter-- she has not forgiven him and stuff. But she's not in contact with Oro because she believes she's too evil for him.

During this plotline, there's a guy a Grim's court who's flair is that he can control people's body with a touch of the hand. Which he uses one night to try to get Isla to hold still long enough for him to kill her. He gets mauled by Lynx first. Isla then decides to go full evil mode and present his decapitated head to the court and have her ~EVIL~ snakes devour it. Before Isla can feel bad about murdering a mostly okay guy, the story implies that he had previously used his powers to rape women during the night.

And I bring that up because there is this stupid morality thread throughout this book where Isla thinks she's evil and tries to do things that are good (they aren't), but ~she just can't help wanting to do evil things.~ Because of that, Isla has these stupid handcuffs installed onto her that suppresses her magic (so that it doesn't make her evil?) until the rape guy incident. Then she removes them and embraces her villain era. At the same time, there's a lot of Grim lore we learn to soften his image so that he appears to be way less of an unrepentant cunt. There's also this weird characterization of Oro, which I will get to later.

Anyway, back to the plot. Isla needs human hearts to go talk to the auger. So she goes to a random village in Nightshade and finds a guy who she considers to be "wicked": he's choking out some girl in an alley way. And then she brutally murders him and carves out his heart. She does this so that she does not feel bad about killing an innocent person. But what Isla has not considered is that by doing this, she is violating his right to due process and is assuming he is guilty until proven innocent. For all she knew, this man was defending himself from a womanly mugger, or that this was a pre-discussed kink scenario between the two. But, like, whatever I guess. The woman she saved is named Sairsha. When Isla returns every night to do her "vigilante" activities, Sairsha is there to give her a pastry and to thank her for doing her part to keep the streets safe 🙂

Yes, there is a character in this stupid book named Sairsha

HEY ALEX ASTER DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW TO SPELL SAOIRSE????

Once Isla has enough hearts, the auger tells her that there's actually another magic system in this world called skyres. Basically, it's blood powered and you have to use your blood to draw sigils. Doing too much will kill you. But Isla, who at this point has been told that there's no way to avoid dying or killing one of her 2 boyfriends, is like "fuck yeah sign me up." The problem is that the skyres are a forgotten magic from the old world. The only person who remembered anything about it was the aforementioned prophet, but he was murdered ages ago by Grim's father. So Isla now has to rediscover how skyres work.

Now please pause for a moment as I quickly move some wet laundry to the dryer.

And now we're back. So even after she gets help from the auger, she STILL decides to continue cutting out the hearts of random men on the streets who may or may not be evil. And this leads to Sairsha roofing Isla and kidnapping her. When Isla wakes, Sairsha reveals that she and her drinking buddies are a part of a cult that believes Isla will either save or destroy the world. And they want Isla to kill them. Isla refuse, so… ok, I need you to follow me on this one. One of the men hands her a sword. She holds it up, wondering "wtf am I supposed to do with this?" and the man rams himself onto the sword, killing himself. The other cult members then try attack her, which she blocks. But then they realize they can just run themselves onto her sword every time she blocks, so she ends up accidentally killing all of them. This is very traumatizing for her

Now, you might be wondering what the fuck is going on with the storm story line. Earlier in the book, democratic leader demoted to gay best friend archetype and leader of the Skyling Azul met her for tea to discuss the tea that is her secret marriage. He is intimately familiar with the storms because apparently they happen to every kingdom, but for some fucking reason Isla has never heard of them before. So he gave her a ring that she can use to trap a little bit of storm that will lead her to its source. Cool. Now she has to wait for a storm, which is a period of time she used to justly carve out the hearts of guilty until proven innocent men. Azul also gave her a fucking bird that will sing when the next storm is intiment, kinda like a tornado siren. So the night the next storm hits, Isla finds that Oro had flown his ass all the way from Lightlark to Nightshade because he was worried about her. It's been weeks dude. Where are you. Anyway, they have a moment where Isla decides that she has to scare Oro off so she goes on an evil speech about how she never loved him and stuff. Then the storm hits, and we race off to capture the storm in the ring. This does not work because SHE DROPS THE FUCKING RING AND LOSES IT. Oops. So now we're back on the fetch quest.

So we're back on the fucking fetch quest, and we fuck around and do other things for a bit. We have a second wedding to improve Isla's reputation. Isla has long gotten the stupid anti-magic handcuffs removed. And there is a little subplot about how there is a traitor among the Wildlings who are desecrating graves and destroying medicinal miracle herbs. Put a pin in that one because we will get back to it. So we learn that the storms are coming from a tear in reality, a portal back to the original world that all of this came from. This is a one way portal, though. So we can't use it to go through ourselves without dying (there is another subplot where Grim wants to do this because he thinks it will save Isla's life; don't worry about this).

So in the last book, Isla had visited Aurora's castle and found a feather as a memento. This is now relevant because the feather is actually a quill and Aurora's ghost can control the quill. Using writing, she tells Isla that she can teach her a little bit about skyres. Isla believes her and that this is actually Aurora's ghost controlling the quill, and starts to learn skyres. But she needs to go to a special library in Grim's winter castle to find more. This, and the fact that she is really freaking horny, is her motivation to finally mend her marriage with Grim.

Grim uses this opportunity to trauma dump about how his childhood sucks. It's royal Nightshade tradition that you have all your kids murder each other so that there will be one ruler. This is stupid when you consider the whole nexus, "lives of the people attached to the ruler's" thing, but whatever. Luckily, Grim didn't kill his siblings on account of his father doing it for him. This is so sad that it makes Isla forgive him entirely and they fuck. Yay.

We go to the winter palace, and Isla finds the needed book. The book helpfully tells her that bone is more powerful than blood. Put a pin in that. Besides that, she and Grim go on some more dates (including a sequence where she gets new clothes for him because he doesn't know how to dress casually) (who the fuck wants their boyfriend to dress worse???) and shit. He also shows her a magic maze in the backyard that is enchanted to forbid people from using their magic. But at the center of the maze is Cronan's casket and body. Cronan, you may recall, is one of the three founders of lightlark, the first nightshade, and the dude that invented the nexus. Isla tries to steal his bones in order to do more powerful magic, but fails. There's also this bit where Isla investigates her dead father's life in order to feel connected to him for a bit. This involves discovering that he had discovered an island, that he had also named Isla. This island is barely relevant.

So at this point, we are about 150 pages into a 370-ish page book. This is also the point where I started reading last night and proceeded to go a little bit insane.

So the next big plot point is that a village in Nightshade is absolutely razed by someone everyone thinks is Isla. It's not Isla because she has been fucking off to learn more skyres, but no one knows she's been doing that because it's been a secret. We spend about a chapter confused as to who this person could be, only to find out that it's the same Wilding traitor who has been fucking around in the background of this book so far. Wanna take a wild guess as to who this traitor is?

Well, you can't because out of left field, we find out that it's Lark Crown-- Isla's ancestor, one of the founders of lightlark, and someone we have been told has been long dead for like a millennia

So what is Lark's deal? Lark has been imprisoned below the earth by Cronan, and has been there for a millenia. Apparently, the dead Nightshade children thing was a way to reinforce her bounds. Because Grimshaw wasn't going around and having children to kill, her bounds weakened enough for her to escape. And, I need you to understand this-- Grim knew about Lark this whole time. He knew that she was locked up because she was famously the most evil person ever (but not famously enough for Isla to know?). He kept this a secret for Isla, and then also didn't do the one thing that would have kept Lark imprisoned

Lark and Cronan (and also Horus, who is Oro's ancestor; he's actually dead so don't worry about him) are from the primary world. Long story short, they were fed up with how Horus's family were tyrants and decided to make their own secondary world. But to do that, they had to kill a lot of people and the world of lightlark is made from the bones of innocent. Then Cronan, who Lark was in love with, betrayed her and imprisoned her so that the land could be powered by her magic. Now that she's escaped, she wants to kill everyone in the secondary world so that she can start over from scratch. To do this, she has raised an undead, nigh-invincible army.

Also, remember Aurora's quill? That was Lark using magic and "stealing" Aurora's handwriting. Because she needs Isla to know skyres for some reason? Mostly, Isla is connected to the heart of Lightlark and needs that power to remake the world.

So the first thing Isla needs to do is go on one last fetch quest to learn one last bit of information that will help us later (insert mickey mouse special tool meme). So she goes to Lightlark so that she can invade this secret Sunling archive, located in a magical desert that only the Sunling ruler has access to. Here, Oro finds her and he's fucking bitter about the whole break up thing. Like he's gone from being generally nice dude to being really mean, but mean in a book 1 Grimshaw way. Like he invades her space and kisses her without her verbal consent-- because he has magic that can tell that she's lying when she says she doesn't want him anymore. Sadly, I still think he's better than Grimshaw so I will allow him to be a cunt for as long as he wants to

This story arc in the desert. Oh my fucking god. I was losing my mind. So it's super hot, so there's all these bits where Isla keeps having to strip naked to stay cool. And Oro just keeps…ogoglinh her. Fucking leering man. And while the stakes are high and you're still concerned about the whole Lark Crown situation, we stop the entire flow of the story so that Isla could have a dream. Which is just a framing device for a flashback to the time she had sex with Oro.

This sex scene chronologically took place during the events of the last book, but we did not see it because Alex Aster did not care about providing the illusion that Oro has a fighting chance at this love triangle until she read the fucking comments. In this sex scene, Isla urges Oro to turn the slinky dress she is wearing into gold. Why? Explicitly, because she wants to help Oro get over his hang-up about having once killed someone with his midas touch. WHY? Because Aster read the fucking comments and decided that Isla is actually obsessed with the gold stuff because it's therapy for Oro. Therapy, while they're having sex. Anyway, Isla rides his dick for a bit before giving him a blow job. Good job, boyo.

So we get the last bit of information from what turns out to be Horus's tomb. And I'll be honest-- the whole sex scene flashback had made me gone so thoroughly insane that I'm a little fuzzy as to what bullshit we actually learned here. I think it's that the portals are being caused by Cronan's body, because had a portaling flair in his lifetime. I don't know, man. Just thinking about this is hurting my brain.

There's a bit where Isla steals some of Horus's powerful bones, which is another betrayal for Oro. Before they can duke it out, we learn that Lark has already brought her armies to Lightlark. So Isla, Grimshaw, Oro, and Oro's friends decide they have to put their petty differences aside and work together. There's more fetch questing here, but to summarize: we go see this monster guy named Remlar for a dagger powerful enough to paralyze Lark. Grim tries to find this monster controling sword he had in the last book, but it's gone now, Turns out, after he used it he put it back in the dragon lair / thief trove he had to looney tunes his way to find it last time. And since then, the thief had moved their trove, probably because some dingbat idiot purposefully trigger all their traps. We had have to get Oro's friend Zed, who is a hobbyist theif, to find the thief. This apparently was a huge ordeal and was mildly traumatizing for him, but it all happened off screen.

This is actually a huge problem in this last act of the book. A lot of bullshit happens, very quickly. The great majority of it is based on information Aster teases, but does not tell the reader until the last second, which is then followed up with Aster telling us that Isla had done something or talked to someone off screen, had gotten X special thing from them, and is now using it has a checkmate against Lark. I am not joking when I say that by the time we reach the final fight, there are like 4 checkmates in a row that can be summarized as "Isla allegedly did this really cool thing off screen that she told no one about and the audience didn't see, but it allows her to do this really cool thing"

So the what does this look like on page? The narration will tell us that Remlar "told Isla a secret." Then in a fight, Isla will use a new power and "this was the secret Remlar told Isla." Then when this does not work, we then find out that Isla:

-laid a physical, magical trap that we had not heard about before

-had talked to the auger to get one last bit of lore, which we are just hearing about now that it's going to help us fight Lark

-Isla realized a plot twist off screen that is helpful for the fight now

-convince Cleo, the Moonling queen who was helping Lark, to switch over to our side in exchange for something that is never really explained to us

It's rapid . One after another. And Aster expects you to be happy with each punch as they come. Because here's the thing about Aster's writing. The logic doesn't matter. She just wants to shock you. She wants to catch you off guard with another plot twist, even if the plot twist is nonsensical or is only possible by not writing a solid 100 pages worth of material. I don't want this book to be any longer than it is, but it's downright insulting how much Aster straight up doesn't write for the last fight of this book

So to summarize what is already the summary of a final conflict. We try to paralyze Lark long enough to open a portal to send her back to the primary realm, but oops Cleo saves her. So Isla decides to make the worst storm of the century in order to depower Lark long enough to try again. There's this bit where Lark tries to imprison her underground, but it doesn't matter. There's also this bit about Isla realizing that as a baby she killed her parents, but it's okay because they knew it was going to happen, but this Does Not Matter. She also has sex with Grimshaw again.

So final fight, we lure Lark to Cronan's coffin, where the portal is. This is where we learn that Cronan is actually alive and has been freely portaling between the secondary and primary worlds. We never see him, so who cares? Anyways, Isla uses her powers to open a new portal to throw Lark into. And she sacrifices herself by going through it as well. And the book ends with Oro and Grim realizing that Isla had gone this one last act of good-- sealing herself off in the primary world… which is named Skyshade. Roll credits

Every fucking book, Aster finds a new way to write badly. I am going insane. I didn't know you could write like this. She is discovering new avenues of absurd badness I couldn't even imagine. I feel like I am going to throw up. I can't think about this book too hard or else I think about the stupid desert sex scene again. WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU PUBLISHED THIS?? Why is the first book somehow turning out to be the most coherent one??? I am going to chew my arm off. I have to read three more of her books next year??? Are you insane??? Am I insane??? -1/5⭐ anyways, thank you for tolerating this long rant. I hope you enjoyed this. I'm going to go read a good book now.

Friend: [asks what was the deal with losing the ring and comments on the love triangle]

Me: So there was a second ring, which she used in the final fight to make the worst story in history to depower Lark. There is more lore about the storms and importance given to the storms in general that I skimmed over because, really, they don't matter.

Also the thing about the second ring is that I'm not sure where she got it? I thought Azul gave her one and she made a big deal out of losing the first one, then there's a throwaway line about Azul giving her a second one that I couldn't decide happened a) when he gave her the first one or b) happened off screen. Initially, I thought it was A and I just forgot but in retrospect it's probably B

I am still on team Oro, even if he's being a total dick rignt now but I have no illusions that Grim isn't going to be the end game. However, I do want to entertain delusions I will get a threesome somewhere

Honestly, I think Aster wants to write a smutty fairy book where the plot matters less than the sex scenes, but she unfortunately has to sell this as YA. Does that stop her from writing sex scenes? No but it causes her to give me a fucking flashback of Isla and Oro having sex instead of just having them fuck in the cave like she probably wanted

"[frankie] you make such a big deal about the sex" these characters are obsessed with it. like every conversation comes down to a scale of how much a character does or does not want to bang. and it's not even remotely sexy about it

[five hours later]

I have realized I forgot to elaborate on a whole plot point about her dead parents lmao

here's the highlights because I'm tired:

-her guardians had initially told isla in book 1 that they killed her parents, then walked it back in book 2. They were the red herrings for the whole wildling traitor BS

-Isla already imprisoned them when, 2/3rds of the way through the book, she decided to use oro's lie detector magic to see if they were lying or not. They were not.

-while imprisoned by Lark (this truly does not matter), Isla realized that her flair actually isn't anti-curse. Nope. It's actually that she can steal other people's flairs if she killed them. And she had actually killed her parents.

-her dad discovered an island and named it isla, but swore that he also wanted it to be the name of his future daughter

-before the final fight, she discovered a letter on the island from her dad that explains the Lore

-the dad, who had an anti-curse flair,* had a charm made with his blood for grimshaw that allowed him to be outside at night despite the curse; this is Aster reading the comments again

-Grimshaw gave the dad the starstick in exchange

-Isla's mom had a fortune telling flair that let her know that Isla is so powerful that she will kill them shortly after being born.

-both mom and dad decided to still have her because they wanted her so much, but they did make a charm to bottle away the mom's future telling flair so that Isla didn't get it right away

-When Isla asked her guardians about THAT, they confirmed it and said they didn't tell her because they did not want to truamatize her

-and also they had suppressed her powers by putting metal shavings from this story's equivalent of kryptonite into all her food, which did not wear off until she was at the centennial

-this is so that she would not have any powers until she was strong enough to handle them

This book is a goddamn mess

The real irony here is that Isla was still traumatized by the idea that she had, as a baby, lost control of her powers enough to kill her parents. Yet she cannot extend any real empathy to Oro, WHO DID THE EXACT SAME THING

Friend: that's a lot to unpack

Me: honestly eager to read crowcaller's review. if anyone could unpack it, it's them

#if something is inaccurate it's because i read half of this book last night and it all became a blur #i basically edited out my friend's comments and my responses along the way and nothing else #so sorry if this is a little incoherent #but at least enjoy this peek into how i talk normally lmao #me rambling #me reading #lightlark #skyshade #alex aster #bookish #books #bookblr #books and reading #also lost some of my comedic italicization in the copy and paste but oh well

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