Despite the fact that Sarah J Maas can write really, really well and I’ve largely enjoyed the novels in this series up to this point, this novel stopped being about the characters and become entirely plot driven.
To create interest, the author paired up most of the main characters with each other in relationships (many sexual and worthy of any purple prose-filled romance), and threw us into repeated, mostly pointless battle scenes written to the same ‘we’re rocking this, oh no we can’t win, oh wait we’re saved’ formula she seems to favour.
Add brutal torture porn (really brutal), a protagonist who keeps both allies and readers in the dark, and a seriously contrived ending that only serves to add more books to the series, and you’ve got a novel that’s really hard to stay interested in or want to go on with. If you get through it, it feels like your emotions have been beaten senseless and hung out to dry in the baking sun, mostly due to the author’s overuse of her ‘hurt the characters to create empathy’ approach to writing.
By the end I’d lost almost all interest in the characters (particularly the protagonist) and can’t say I care much about what happens next in the story. Gone is the (mostly) clever plotting and character twists that marked the earlier books in the series, which now relies on action, sex and contrived plotting to keep the story moving.
At least the narrator for the audio book version has improved her performance from the beginning of the series, going from what sounded like constantly angry and spiteful to merely disdainful and even mellow some of the time.
