I meant for this whole review to go in one post, but damn, I had a lot of complaints, way more than I thought once I started writing them down. Some are nitpicky; most are related to characters and writing choices. For the fans of this series, I did enjoy this series for what it is, but I’ll never defend it as great literature. It’s Sharknado levels of fun, and I live for stupid shit like that. For the haters, enjoy. Oh, and spoilers ahead.
Now, on to the cons, and hoo boy, are there a lot of them. First, I was shocked to see this was labeled book 7 and not 6. I had no interest in reading Tower of Dawn, as it was marketed as a side story novella. Kingdom of Ash expects you to have read it and spends little to no time explaining who all these new characters are. It’s not confusing, just annoying for those of us not invested in Chaol’s story enough to read the novella. If you like Chaol, more power to you. I just didn’t care enough about what was a sure outcome to waste my time reading a novella about him and only him. Nesryn goes with him as well, but she was barely a character in the fifth (fourth? I don’t know anymore) book, more a cool background piece than a real person. That’s not nearly enough for me to pick up an entire book.
Maas brings in four new “personalities” from Tower of Dawn that really just take up space and fawn over Aelin, just like everyone else. Hasar is just a crabbier version of Aelin; Sartaq loves Nesryn and that’s it; Yrene is Chaol’s wife who’s a healer and that’s it; and Borte likes arguing with her fiance. They might be more interesting in ToD, but here, they just read like cardboard cutouts. They’re unnecessary and boring.
And speaking of unnecessary, there are WAY too many POV characters in these books. What started with a handful of mostly essential characters has now become a library’s worth of them. Even Lysandra’s ward, Evangeline, gets a couple POV bits to herself. Why? They added nothing to the story aside from remind us that she was there and still alive. More POVs should only ever be added to further the story or themes. I kid you not, Elide and Lorchan are together for 90% of the last two books, and for some reason, they both have POV chapters. Elide was already established and should’ve been the only one necessary, but you know, Lorchan’s hot so we should hear him angst too. And that is all he does, by the way, angsts over Elide. Hell, by the end, I was a little surprised Abraxos didn’t have his own POV chapter.
Maas also adds nonsensical things in to ramp up the drama. The worst offender is the character Darrow. He and TWO other old men boss Aedion around throughout this entire book, because... reasons, I guess. They don’t recognize Aelin as queen, fine. But they’re three old dudes against Aedion, who literally commands their entire army and the fire-bringer all the people in their whole country rally to. If anyone can give me a logical reason why Aedion didn’t just ignore every order they attempted to give him, I’m all ears. Instead, he tiptoes around them constantly and outright steals his own army from under their noses to do what he wants anyway. Why? They all know damn well Aelin is the rightful queen and they wouldn’t even have an army without her and Aedion. She could crush them under her thumb, and they all know that too. Hell, Aedion’s treason would even be forgiven in moments when she took her throne back from... no one. Darrow isn’t even trying to be king of Terrasen. He just doesn’t like the idea of this bratty teenager being his queen, and who can blame him? Yeah, I know she wants her country to be different, but she can’t change anything from the sidelines when the old rules are the only things keeping those men in power over her. There is no good reason for Aedion to obey any of their orders. They can do nothing to stop him, and they all know it. They are literally only there so Aedion has someone besides Lysandra to be pissed off at.
Speaking of Aedion being pissed off at Lysandra. For the haters out there, yes, he has every right to be mad at her. She may not have been the one to come up with this insanity, sure, but she knew Aelin suspected it might be necessary. Telling the one person who foams at the mouth anytime someone gets within spitting distance of his cousin that maybe something terrible could happen to her, making this plan necessary, should be at the top of your to-do list. She knew damn well what she was doing and how he would react the entire time Aelin was teaching her to play pretend. He should be angry with her for not telling him what was going through Aelin’s head, not for following the orders of their queen. Yes, him throwing he naked out in the snow was a major dick move, and I’m glad that she didn’t let him forget it. What I don’t condone is his reaction to seeing Aelin again. He just hugs her like nothing ever happened. He’s an asshole to Lysandra for months, but he just forgives Aelin for everything as soon as he sees her. I’m sorry but no. I would’ve forgiven the entire conflict between him and Lysandra being tedious if he had just punched her in the face before he hugged her. God knows she deserves it for all the shit she’s pulled over the course of six books.
So, I hate Aelin Galathynius. Like straight up hate her. She went from being a brat in the first few books to being the worst case of Mary Sueitis I have ever seen outside of self-insert fanfiction. First, she’s a secret princess, a “twist” anyone with a brain could see coming. She’s also somehow the best at everything she does, even though she shows no evidence of any of it. How does the country’s best assassin get caught? On top of that, how does anyone even know who the country’s best assassin is? Shouldn’t hiding your identity be rule number one in the assassin handbook? This shit-licker could’ve been any happy-ass teenager with a knife pretending to be this famous assassin when they caught her. How would they know? Answer, they shouldn’t have any idea (that would’ve also made for a much more interesting story). So, not only is she the best at everything she tries for reasons, she’s also the only one in the whole damn world with fire magic, the only thing that can hurt the demons for a majority of the series. And she doesn’t just have regular old everyday fire magic. No, she has fire to rival fifteen suns going supernova at the same time. She’s also the prettiest and smartest and nicest and snarkiest and funniest girl in the world. She outsmarts someone thousands of years old who could’ve snapped her neck or dropped her in to a literal Hell with a flick of her wrist. But no, Princess Mary Sue wants her new boytoy free, so the villainess has to get tricked into letting him go. Now, let’s not forget she’s also the Chosen One who deus ex machinas her way out of sacrificing herself because no one can do anything without her there to save the day. Seriously, no one ever wins anything unless she’s there. It happens more than once in this book. Her boytoy and company show up to rescue her from aforementioned villainess just as she’s breaking herself out, and they can’t get her chains off until she somehow shows them how to unlock them. She then proceeds to get them out of the country through her magic of summoning deus ex machinas whenever she needs one, and they arrive just in time to rescue Chaol and Nesryn from certain doom. She stops a cascading river with fire because science, and when all hope is lost back home, she shows up on a magical white deer with the Rohir- oops, I mean her army. She also somehow holds off two of the most powerful creatures in the world with her assassin skills and barely any magic, because... villains have to lose, I guess. You know what Aelin loses by the end of the book? Her humanity, which she suddenly cares about ten pages before it’s gone. Aedion lost his father and at least half an army at his command. Manon lost the only people she really cared about in the whole world, and she could do nothing but watch them sacrifice themselves. And Aelin lost her humanity when she’s already been living as a fae since book 3. Oh God, how will she ever survive such a loss? She is actually the worst.
These books, this one in particular, are clearly written with a younger audience in mind (much younger than me at least, and I’m 30), and I strongly believe the target audience is girls. There is so much description of how beautiful the men in this series are that it almost borders on obscene. I do appreciate having a clear picture of what characters look like, but I do not need to know about all the rippling muscles and long fingers that all the men in this series seem to have. Even bookworm Dorian is described as being oh-so-sexy even though he doesn’t appear to have ever handled a weapon in his life. There is a lot of pandering to the female audience, especially with the sex scenes. In a YA novel, these are pretty inappropriate. She started with sex scenes being a fade-to-black kind of event, and now, almost every single one is described in disgusting detail. I like romance as much as the next girl, but if I wanted soft-core porn, I’d read romance novels. To top that shift off, she still insists on using “rutting” as a substitute for “fucking,” and I think that’s what bothers me the most about the whole change here. They are completely interchangeable in every context, to the point where I just read “rutting” as “fucking” every single time. This isn’t Brandon Sanderson’s silly but story-appropriate swearing. It’s just lazy writing. And detailed descriptions of sex are okay, but swearing? Someone call Takamata. We need to start the Inquisition. (History of the World reference for anyone confused.)
This story ends exactly as you should expect it to, with a happily ever after. None of the main characters die, and those with names go out as sacrifices, which is honestly consistent with the rest of the deaths in this series. The deaths we do get are mostly to make the main characters feel bad for no real reason. Aedion even flat-out states that Gavriel could’ve stayed inside the walls, and there is no argument, author or characters, as to why he had to go outside. At least the Thirteen’s sacrifice makes more sense. It was still pretty dumb to have them go out at all, but I don’t know if I could come up with a better way to destroy those witch towers. What they did was noble and understandable in context, though there were probably any number of ways it could’ve been avoided. I’ve seen Desolation of Smaug. Just drop a dragon/whale/elephant-Lysandra on top of the tower before they even get it fixed up to move again.
One last complaint that I have regarding the ending is largely the villains. There are three of them, and all three kind of go out like bitches. Erawan, the dickhead pulling the strings since book 1, gets tricked and healed to death. There are a lot of millennia-old creatures getting tricked into doing stupid things in these books. Manon’s grandmother (who never gets a name by the way) gets blown up by Asterin. Honestly, hers was probably the most satisfying end of the three because Asterin got the vengeance she deserved for her hunter and child. Maeve somehow became the biggest threat halfway through the series, and she meets her end in the most extravagant fashion, impaled by Fenrys and then decapitated by Aelin and burned to ash. What irritates me most about Maeve is she could’ve been great. If anyone has read the manga, Magi, you know what I’m talking about. Maeve is discount Gyokuen with half the threat and less than a quarter the sense. Where Gyokuen is highly capable, both as a fighter and a politician, Maeve is kind of a pushover who gets tricked by our “heroes” numerous times. She’s shown preparing for all sorts of unlikely eventualities, but she somehow can’t handle the plucky teenagers. Give me a break. From the moment you meet her, you know Gyokuen is going to be one of those bad guys that will require some clever thinking to defeat. I felt like Maeve could just be snuck up on and murdered by anyone who knew her schedule. Her last ditch effort against Aelin was clever, but other than that, she barely puts up a fight despite all the fear and hype she gets from almost every character in the book.
Now, like I said above, I did enjoy these books. I don’t feel like my time was wasted or that I was manipulated by them at all. I had fun with them the same way that I have fun with SyFy channel original movies. The characters and story had so much more potential than what this amounted to, but I don’t hate this series at all. Yes, the subplot with the gods was idiotic and unnecessary, but the valg were interesting as an enemy type. Yes, the romance shoved down my throat could be awful at times, but some of the relationships were genuinely sweet. Chaol and Dorian are the best bros, and I love Lysandra taking it upon herself to protect this little girl when she could’ve looked the other way. Manon’s relationship with Asterin was great as well. Do I wish it was better? Absolutely. Should it be boycotted by everyone? Of course not. Despite their problems, these books are fun, fluffy, popcorn movie fun, and sometimes, that’s just fine.
