Kyle Erickson

“What is a man's life worth?”
“The slavemasters say one is worth about two emerald broams.”
“And what do you say?”
“A life is priceless.”

It took me five months of casually dipping into The Way of Kings in between other books to finish my reread. Well, not true. It took me five months to read the first half. It took me three days to read the second half. Oops.

Kingdoms of Death continues Sun Eater's streak of being absolutely bananas. This whole book is pretty depressing and is not going to be a happy read. There is also a shorter section and a longer section in the middle I found pretty boring at the time but the things they lead to are very important, so I forgave that. The stuff that everyone talks about in this book is so emotional and well written; Sun Eater has not made me emotional before this, but I was fighting tears for the entire last chunk of this book. It's not so much what is happening, but how it is being written about. I was put through the ringer and exhausted after marathoning the second half of this book in a night.

I will say a legitimate criticism I have of this book is just the overwhelming amount of fake language stuff in it. The previous books all had some of this and it never bothered me. But large portions of dialogue in this book are written in a made up language and then immediately translated to the reader. Just...say Hadrian translated it, and leave me out of this.

9/10

Idk how this is a book ostensibly about what great friends these two are and the power of friendship and yada yada when these are two of the most toxic, least friendly individuals I've ever read about. Aspects of this book were really good but the two main characters were so consistently poor at communicating and just the general concept of what a friend is, but we keep getting told how important their friendship is and how they have a bond for the ages and I just absolutely don't agree. So that soured me somewhat. Very toxic portrayal of friendship from the ground up.

I also didn't like how the author had every single character talk about life as if it's a game or the things they've learned from games just because they're gamers. I'm a gamer and I have lived my whole life around gamers and at no point has any of them waxed pontific about how the decisions they make in life are vaguely game like or that you can start over in a game but you can't in life and there are save points in games but there's no save points in life and yada yada. It would be fine if this was one character's viewpoint but it's everyone, always, even in life or death situations. Just very on the nose.

But this book did get genuine emotion out of me several times and had me close to tears at one point. The writing is very good and I think I would have liked the portrayal of the main characters more if we weren't constantly told how important they were to each other, because the character voices and personalities, in isolation, were well done.

This book is awesome.

Near the end of the book, some characters are proclaiming their loyalty to Mara, and I'm sitting there like “me too!!”. Mara is one of my favorite protagonists ever. The way she uses her cultural upbringing, her own perspective and intelligence, and the perspective of others to challenge the status quo and fight her enemies in ways they don't expect is just SO good.

I'm giving this 9.5/10 because it did feel a bit overlong in spots and there was a minor issue I had with the ending. But without a doubt one of the best political fantasy books I've ever read.

This book is very good and I would encourage everyone, but especially those with children, to read it. However it's also frustrating because the evidence seems so clear that we are headed towards a bad result and we will just not course correct in any sort of meaningful way. I hope this book inspires A) a small amount of parents to be more intentional with their kid's level of screens, B) a small amount of people to be more intentional with their own level of screens, and C) more research and books into this topic which will hopefully result in D) some actual change on a societal level.

But we'll see.