The Name of All Things Book Review
The Name of All Things Book Review by Jenn lyons
I swear to God that I feel like I have been reading this book for my entire life. I can’t remember a time I wasn’t reading Jenn Lyons’ next installment in the A Chorus of Dragons Series.
And while I found the first installment, The Ruin of Kings, filled with jargon, confusing for a large portion, and sometimes over inundated with the many god-kings, characters, and places, I also found it action-packed, whimsical, and truly original with her use of POV and world building.
This unfortunately all goes to shit in the sequel.
I was excited enough about The Ruin of Kings to immediately pick up the sequel and read it with starry eyes and enthusiastic gusto. However, it was quickly established that this novel was not like the others for one dominant reason: the main character.
Now, I won’t get into the nitty gritty about why I enjoyed Khirin D’Mon as a main character in the last book, as you could simply read my review about it here, but to summarize, I found him witty, charming, engaging, and driven. Perhaps naively, although I truly feel like I was duped, Khirin is hardly in the second installment at all (even if the jacket cover makes you believe otherwise).
Instead, the main character of book two is a girl named Janel Danorak who has suffered at the hands of the demon Xaltorath (just like Khirin) and has manifested superhuman-strength as a result. It chronicles her life up to the current present where she is currently sitting in a tavern with Khirin three days after the conclusion of last book and is essentially telling Khirin every single fucking thing that has happened to her in her lifetime to bring her to the current moment.
It is beyond maddening.
If Lyons thought she was creatively manipulating the narrative by doing a paltry back-and-forth maneuver in which Janel and Brother Qown are re-telling their own stories to “bring Khirin up to speed” it failed. I didn’t find it clever, charming, or engaging. Instead I was irritated, bored, and indifferent.
Instead of getting more action, progressing the plot, establishing more of the world, building relationships that have already been established, and you know, advancing Khirin’s character and motives, a character we have entirely seen the world through up to his point, we instead get what comes across to me as the longest, most boring “filler” in the history of books I have ever read.
This whole almost-600-page book felt like a, “Oops. I wanted to include all this information earlier cause it’s important. Yeah. Important. I’ll just spend a whole book talking about shit that doesn’t matter and that already happened so that I can tell everyone how important Janel is. Perfect.”
I don’t remember the last time I was so frustrated finishing a book. This book did nothing, and I mean nothing, to progress anything that happened in book one except for maybe the last forty pages, and that’s being generous. Instead, it was essentially Lyons’ way of word vomiting exposition onto her audience without actually telling an engaging story or continuing book one in any fashion. Make no mistake, ladies and gentleman, this is the Janel Danorak show and nothing else.
Maybe I wouldn’t have hated it so much if I actually found Janel to be an engaging character like Khirin, or even like Thurvishar, Tyentso, or Teraeth, but nope. Hell, I would have taken Senera or Brother Qown over Janel any day, as they were much more interesting side characters than Janel could ever hope to be.
To me, Janel came across as the most generic crybaby who whined like a little bitch and pretended to be strong for the entire book when she was really just unintelligent, uninspired, and lacking in every way. Lyons tries very, very hard to tell you that Janel is amazing. She’s so cool, so strong, so authoritative, so different, omg. But no.
Unlike book one, where we learn Khirin’s characteristics through trial and error and are able to deduce them for ourselves, Lyons switches methods completely in this book and just tells us over and over again that Janel is super awesome hoping that it will stick.
It doesn’t.
And on top of that, why do Khirin and her get together at the end? Why does Khirin give one inch of a damn about her?? He has no reason to. He’s known her for three goddamn days as that is the duration of THIS WHOLE BOOK. It’s completely out-of-character for Khirin and frustratingly nonsensical. It simply serves as another example of how Lyons is spoon-feeding us how cool Janel is when all it really does is make me never want to pick up the book again.
I can’t even really say anything about the plot. Which, it being 600 pages is pretty pathetic. Bottom line: Janel needs to kill a dragon. She needs a special spear to do it. She spends a vastly inordinate amount of time getting this spear and dicking around and then goes to kill the dragon. Oh, and Senera and Relos Var are killing people like normal and Relos Var betrays everyone again.
That’s about it. That’s the whole book.
Hopefully now you can see why I’m so vexed. There was no reason Lyons needed to take this much time and this length to tell Janel’s story. Quite honestly, a chapter or two would have sufficed for her background and then her and Khirin could have set off for their adventure. That’s it. That’s what should have happened.
But it didn’t. It didn’t at all. And this poorly paced, poorly written, horribly executed sequel was the epitome of a disappointment.
Recommendation: I don’t even know. Read The Ruin of Kings and pretend it’s a stand-alone novel. When the third book comes out, check Google Pages to make sure the whole thing isn’t a flashback of Janel Danorak and I might be interested. Huge emphasis on the might. This is why I stick to YA, people.
Score: 3/10
