I did not like this book. Perhaps you will like this book. If so I’m glad. I want people to like books. Reading books in general is good for all of us, because I want publishing to continue to exist and make more books. Books for you and also books for me. In the latter camp, this book does not fall.
I enjoy fantasy. I enjoy books about dragons! I wouldn’t say I’m a huge fan of series that spend entire books setting up a mythos, but it turns out even more so I’m not a fan of books that spend paragraphs running through 400 years of world building and history. When your main character uses historical recitation as a mechanism to calm her nerves, you know that you have too much backstory and not enough time to expound upon it.
Too much happens in this book! Too much of it requires you to understand and believe in a magic system that has no rules! When I can’t understand the stakes, I find it hard to care very much about what happens to our characters. What does it mean? What is a lesser power? And most importantly, why is one of them being able to use a ballpoint pen????
I’ll give Yarros credit– there is very little plot armor in this book. At the same time there are a lot of characters, so perhaps it’s more that our main characters have a lot of extraneous but lovable secondary characters to insulate them from the realities of War. In that sense, it feels a little more gritty than others I’ve read…but at the same time see above re: I don’t understand what the rules of the world are.
Another review of this book might just have been the stream of conscious texts that I sent a friends of mine while reading this book, 90% of which were predictions most of which came true. I’m vaguely curious how this ends– although I feel like I could probably guess– but will likely bug someone to explain it to me. Or Wikipedia?