Julia Wilson
Character: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Plot: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
Prose: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
World: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
OVERALL: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
This is my review for the trilogy, which I’ve been slowly reading over the last couple of months.
Ashes of the Sun came to my attention sometime during its release in the pandemic for two reasons. Firstly, the gorgeous cover designs, specifically the UK’s choice to have it be in black and white with those striking splashes of red. But most honestly — it was the hand. I can’t get over how much I love it?? It and the whole illustration look so otherworldly and interesting, and when I look at it I grow happy and end up wishing I could draw hands like that; Scott M. Fischer killed it. Secondly, it was marketed on one of my bedrock favourite dynamics — childhood friends-to-enemies, more specifically in the form of estranged siblings. For these reasons the series has been on the back of my brain for at least two years, and I finally took the plunge once I decided I was sick of starting series and not finishing them; I needed to train myself to go do that again, dammit!
And so here we are. That’s two trilogies done this year, now I need to go back and mop up some of the others scattered through my list.
Not going to lie, I thought there would be more interpersonal drama than ended up happening, and that’s deflated some of my opinions. I can’t say which of the siblings I “liked” more, as I found both to be a little … slippery. The easiest to pinpoint a “why” on is Gyre, due to him not really having a character arc in the first book which had unfortunate knock-on effects for me across the second and third entries. I found myself thinking during that book that if I was the editor, I would have axed the prologue and held the reveal that Gyre and Maya were siblings until they met each other again as adults. As it stands, Gyre is always a guy who hates the Twilight Order and is never faced with the hard questions on what if he’s (sometimes) wrong about his position? Maya has this, but not Gyre, and that made me sad.
With Maya, I’m not as sure; I think I just wanted more exploration of what it means to her to be a centarch, as in, inner reflection from her of how she came to the Twilight Order? The story she was told by the Order vs. what Gyre tells her kinda gets brushed over and man, that has so much potential to dig up other aspects to her situation I can’t help but feel there was … I hate saying this, but wasted opportunity here. I thought she had interesting flaws in that she had difficulty accepting the complications of the world/not easily seeing things from other perspectives, something that ends up costing her dearly, but I don’t think she had enough opportunities to interact with outsiders and show this characterisation to its fullest potential, as the people she mostly interacts with are either those within the Twilight Order, or enemies she’s out to slay.
As for other characters, Kit annoyed me very much in the first book due to her Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl characterisation, but it did get better in the next two books once she had more people to dilute her page time. Varo was also fun with his stories about all his friends that either die or are awfully mutilated on the job. I also found the main antagonist of the series to be … okay. I don’t mind how he’s just some bad guy that needs to be dealt with, but I wish we got to see more of how his presence impacts the characters than ended up happening; one of my complaints with Emperor of Ruin are the flashbacks, the information of which I would have liked to have been delivered in a different manner.
Now, I’m pretty relaxed on worldbuilding in fantasy books. I’m equally happy with the five-minute crafts Abercrombie “the northern country is called the North and they speak Northern” approach as I am with the more elaborate Sanderson “here are fifty pages of characters musing on Alethi gender roles” style (actually I kid; please do not make me read fifty pages on made-up gender roles). So, imagine my absolute surprise when my favourite thing in this trilogy ended up being the world Wexler built. Four hundred years before the start of the story, a war between two factions called the Chosen and the Ghouls broke out. The Chosen wielded genetically disposed divine magic, and the Ghouls everyman biomagic. The sides wiped each other out, leaving behind a plague-ridden, gross-biomagic fallout post-apocalyptic fantasy world. But before the Chosen died out, they entrusted a group of humans capable of wielding divine magic to shepherd humankind as they did before; this group then became a Jedi-like order called the Twilight Order. What a playground to delve into! I loved the way the post-war politics shaped this story in the form of the Twilight Order, the government, and the rogue, fiercely independent Splinter Kingdoms. It was an amazing, interesting setup that other fantasy books only wished they could have the depths of, and I will be eagerly looking for more books with this much world potential in the future.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with these books and am glad I read them. I don’t think I’ll be rereading these any time in the future, but I will carry fond memories of the worldbuilding in particular.
Character: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Plot: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
Prose: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
World: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
OVERALL: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
This is my review for the trilogy, which I’ve been slowly reading over the last couple of months.
Ashes of the Sun came to my attention sometime during its release in the pandemic for two reasons. Firstly, the gorgeous cover designs, specifically the UK’s choice to have it be in black and white with those striking splashes of red. But most honestly — it was the hand. I can’t get over how much I love it?? It and the whole illustration look so otherworldly and interesting, and when I look at it I grow happy and end up wishing I could draw hands like that; Scott M. Fischer killed it. Secondly, it was marketed on one of my bedrock favourite dynamics — childhood friends-to-enemies, more specifically in the form of estranged siblings. For these reasons the series has been on the back of my brain for at least two years, and I finally took the plunge once I decided I was sick of starting series and not finishing them; I needed to train myself to go do that again, dammit!
And so here we are. That’s two trilogies done this year, now I need to go back and mop up some of the others scattered through my list.
Not going to lie, I thought there would be more interpersonal drama than ended up happening, and that’s deflated some of my opinions. I can’t say which of the siblings I “liked” more, as I found both to be a little … slippery. The easiest to pinpoint a “why” on is Gyre, due to him not really having a character arc in the first book which had unfortunate knock-on effects for me across the second and third entries. I found myself thinking during that book that if I was the editor, I would have axed the prologue and held the reveal that Gyre and Maya were siblings until they met each other again as adults. As it stands, Gyre is always a guy who hates the Twilight Order and is never faced with the hard questions on what if he’s (sometimes) wrong about his position? Maya has this, but not Gyre, and that made me sad.
With Maya, I’m not as sure; I think I just wanted more exploration of what it means to her to be a centarch, as in, inner reflection from her of how she came to the Twilight Order? The story she was told by the Order vs. what Gyre tells her kinda gets brushed over and man, that has so much potential to dig up other aspects to her situation I can’t help but feel there was … I hate saying this, but wasted opportunity here. I thought she had interesting flaws in that she had difficulty accepting the complications of the world/not easily seeing things from other perspectives, something that ends up costing her dearly, but I don’t think she had enough opportunities to interact with outsiders and show this characterisation to its fullest potential, as the people she mostly interacts with are either those within the Twilight Order, or enemies she’s out to slay.
As for other characters, Kit annoyed me very much in the first book due to her Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl characterisation, but it did get better in the next two books once she had more people to dilute her page time. Varo was also fun with his stories about all his friends that either die or are awfully mutilated on the job. I also found the main antagonist of the series to be … okay. I don’t mind how he’s just some bad guy that needs to be dealt with, but I wish we got to see more of how his presence impacts the characters than ended up happening; one of my complaints with Emperor of Ruin are the flashbacks, the information of which I would have liked to have been delivered in a different manner.
Now, I’m pretty relaxed on worldbuilding in fantasy books. I’m equally happy with the five-minute crafts Abercrombie “the northern country is called the North and they speak Northern” approach as I am with the more elaborate Sanderson “here are fifty pages of characters musing on Alethi gender roles” style (actually I kid; please do not make me read fifty pages on made-up gender roles). So, imagine my absolute surprise when my favourite thing in this trilogy ended up being the world Wexler built. Four hundred years before the start of the story, a war between two factions called the Chosen and the Ghouls broke out. The Chosen wielded genetically disposed divine magic, and the Ghouls everyman biomagic. The sides wiped each other out, leaving behind a plague-ridden, gross-biomagic fallout post-apocalyptic fantasy world. But before the Chosen died out, they entrusted a group of humans capable of wielding divine magic to shepherd humankind as they did before; this group then became a Jedi-like order called the Twilight Order. What a playground to delve into! I loved the way the post-war politics shaped this story in the form of the Twilight Order, the government, and the rogue, fiercely independent Splinter Kingdoms. It was an amazing, interesting setup that other fantasy books only wished they could have the depths of, and I will be eagerly looking for more books with this much world potential in the future.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with these books and am glad I read them. I don’t think I’ll be rereading these any time in the future, but I will carry fond memories of the worldbuilding in particular.
This book was one big giant yes.
I'd had my eye on this book for several months before it came out and was lucky to get a copy through work. And, to bring back a tired turn of phrase in relation to this book, well, I ate it up. I loved the characters, I loved the tangle of motivations going on throughout the book, and I loved the Gene Wolfe inspired asides and insights.
She could tell them about the relief that alcohol brought as the months had dragged on; about the guilt-ridden dreams, and the compass with Salem's picture that weighed heavier than chains. About all those nights standing over her son's sleeping form as she thought about smothering him, then stopping herself. About the discarded victims she'd carried, one by one by one to a slew of homeless shelters over the months.
But if Devon talked about any of that, then she'd have to talk about how you really could get used to anything, with enough time and motivation; how her crimes swiftly dwindled from horrific and extraordinary to a facet of her everyday reality.
She had worked out at some point that this was how the Easterbrooks conducted their trafficking without breaking a sweat; how the patriarchs overlooked the suffering and servitude of the mother-brides they destroyed; how humans could continue to exist in an infrastructure of misery. Trauma became routine, and cruelty mundane. Just life, innit.
The Families were not on her side. This realization struck Devon like a bellringer with a gong mallet, shaking her all the way through even as her lungs burned and her feet pounded the underbrush, nose full of the scent of evergreens and fresh snow. The Families were her blood relations, people she loved and had been loved by; her entire world. They were now her Great Enemy.
In fact, they always had been. However loving her childhood, her flesh was still theirs, her goods for the selling. Like pigs or chickens raised for the slaughter, she had developed affection for her keepers, and they for her. But that did not stop her from being consumed; pig farmers still chewed their bacon with enjoyment. Affection only made cruelty rueful.
This book was one big giant yes.
I'd had my eye on this book for several months before it came out and was lucky to get a copy through work. And, to bring back a tired turn of phrase in relation to this book, well, I ate it up. I loved the characters, I loved the tangle of motivations going on throughout the book, and I loved the Gene Wolfe inspired asides and insights.
She could tell them about the relief that alcohol brought as the months had dragged on; about the guilt-ridden dreams, and the compass with Salem's picture that weighed heavier than chains. About all those nights standing over her son's sleeping form as she thought about smothering him, then stopping herself. About the discarded victims she'd carried, one by one by one to a slew of homeless shelters over the months.
But if Devon talked about any of that, then she'd have to talk about how you really could get used to anything, with enough time and motivation; how her crimes swiftly dwindled from horrific and extraordinary to a facet of her everyday reality.
She had worked out at some point that this was how the Easterbrooks conducted their trafficking without breaking a sweat; how the patriarchs overlooked the suffering and servitude of the mother-brides they destroyed; how humans could continue to exist in an infrastructure of misery. Trauma became routine, and cruelty mundane. Just life, innit.
The Families were not on her side. This realization struck Devon like a bellringer with a gong mallet, shaking her all the way through even as her lungs burned and her feet pounded the underbrush, nose full of the scent of evergreens and fresh snow. The Families were her blood relations, people she loved and had been loved by; her entire world. They were now her Great Enemy.
In fact, they always had been. However loving her childhood, her flesh was still theirs, her goods for the selling. Like pigs or chickens raised for the slaughter, she had developed affection for her keepers, and they for her. But that did not stop her from being consumed; pig farmers still chewed their bacon with enjoyment. Affection only made cruelty rueful.
Character: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Plot: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Prose: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ (I always forget how much Paolini loves making people tttrot~)
OVERALL: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
My ridiculously long essay about this book, hosted on Substack, can be found at the URL at the end of this review.
Let it be known that, just like Eragon, Murtagh is not very bright. It must be from Mum’s side of the family.
I wanted this to be more than it was.
This was one of my most anticipated books of the year, but I’ve had mixed feelings on the whole affair since the announcement. Like many, The Inheritance Cycle was my all-time favourite series from when I was about nine to somewhere in my early teens, and Murtagh left such a huge impression on me as a kid that his archetype (the angsty, angry, yet tragic bad boy loner with parental issues) is still one of my favourite things ever; I cannot stress how much the one proper chapter he has in Eldest drove me feral between the two years of my reading it and Brisingr’s release. That being said, I think the magic for the series started fading in my eyes with the release of Inheritance, which I didn’t love, and my admiration for Paolini as a writer dulled with his other novel To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, which I thought was pretty … meh; the only thing I could and can really say about it was, “yup, that was indeed a book I read”.
So I was excited to revisit my OG bad boy, he has so much potential from where we last saw him, but I was worried about Paolini’s ability to deliver a *good book*. And mixed feelings is a good way to put it now that I’ve finished.
Firstly, I adored getting to see Murtagh and Thorn’s psyches seventeen years after being introduced to them and deciding that these two would be my favourite poor little meow meows/blorbos (or whatever the kids say nowadays) forever. My throat did all the closing up and my heart ached whenever I read the passages about their experiences in Urû’baen at the hands of Galbatorix and his court. A shining beacon throughout the novel was in watching the two of them struggling with and addressing the trauma they experienced, most notable in Thorn’s fear of confined spaces and the ugly consequences that follow.
The book is very good at making me feel emotions for Murtagh and Thorn. But I wanted to feel, well, more. I wanted Murtagh to be a book about them navigating a post-Galbatorix landscape where they must deal with the fact that they’ve committed these atrocities, willingly or not. I wanted the main conflict to be centred around the fact that people don’t trust Murtagh and Thorn. I wanted a character-driven piece of storytelling.
Instead, the book is mostly a plot-driven sequel-setter. I’ve not been left a happy camper as it stumbles into the age-old sequel problem of oh shit, we need to escalate the stakes, and it’s decided to do this by introducing a Deep State, cheese-morality, Satanic Panic influenced, Westboro-fire-and-brimstone-esque Cthulhu cult that Murtagh and Thorn need to take out. But oops, we ran out of pages please buy the next book.
Man, when this was announced back in March, I thought was going to be a character study standalone D:
So, it’s an action-adventure book, it’s a book with all the swords and gore and magician duels of the previous books. It’s a winning formula, but, this time around, not for me. The characters stumble about from one plot point to the next through blind luck and by making strange (stupid) decisions, and I struggled to find a solid, motivational throughline for the events going on other than “we need to get the book to happen”. I found the main conflict centred around Bachel and her cult to be underwhelming at best, and downright boring at worst, and I just … I wanted more, and not in the way that more sequels! can fix.
In summary, Murtagh feels like a book teetering on the edge of having something to say, but never quite succeeding because instead of delving into what made Murtagh and Thorn so interesting in the first place, it’s more focused on doing, to be blunt about it, boring, tired, ill-thought out, and done-better-elsewhere plot things for later books. How can you have characters like Murtagh and Thorn, who have long been those with the most potential in the Cycle, and decide that this was the story that needed to be told about them? Setting them up to save the world isn’t why I found them interesting.
——
Criticisms from the original books that have been addressed and I am super happy about!
- The Empire is given more substance to it from the flat, evil entity it was in the previous books, hooray! The soldiers are talked about, the social classes are given more stage room, the economies and governments in cities and towns do exist; it was more than I was expecting upon coming into the book. Good job, I would like more, please.
- Murtagh is also, unlike Eragon, not ridiculously bloodthirsty. Sure, he is dangerous, but he’s not going about punching people so hard their hearts stop and coming away with the conclusion of “huh, I should change my knuckles to kill people even harder”, or “man, I wish I could kill a few more people for my literal murder mountain so I can have an even headcount of two hundred”. Murtagh and Eragon may be equally stupid, but at least Murtagh (mostly) escaped the psychopath gene that Eragon and Roran have.
However …
- Murtagh and Thorn’s relationship feels very much the same as Eragon and Saphira’s in that the Rider is definitely in charge and the dragon is, at best, a flying sidekick. Very frustrating. There are nice scenes between Murtagh and Thorn which show them as equals in the relationship, don’t get me wrong, and I love how they’re in each other’s corners, but Murtagh’s the one making the big decisions and calling the shots, with Thorn always going along with what Murtagh wants to do. So I’m not really sold on this being an equal partnership.
- We also return to the weirdly worded pseudo-medieval speak, and I’m still not a fan. Pls Chris. And whilst we’re on the subject of dialogue, can we stop with the written accents please. It’s so frustrating to read these “not-quite-Cockney-but-aping-on-something-vaguely-East-London”, are-youse-’avin-a-laff-at-me accents and I wish the trend would die. Just stop.
- Paolini still cannot write poetry and verse beyond the first two-ish lines of a stanza. I automatically skip these now because they’re the reading equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
- There is still a looot of filler going on here. Flying around filler, random musings filler, random worldbuilding filler, descriptions that are so lengthy that they become, for me at least, ineffective. This book could have easily been 100 pages shorter if the filler was either cut or strictly edited down. This is something I always forget is a thing when I pick up a Paolini book until I’m like, “Oh…. Yeah.”
I will read the next book because Murtagh and Thorn are my favourites, but can it reach the heights of its potential? Well, that’s up to Chris and his team at Knopf Books, now.
If you would like to read an utterly exhaustive, in-depth analysis on this book that dissects the plot, characters, and writing, you can find my heinously long essay on Substack below.
Also who decided that the world map at the front of the travel book would be in made-up runes? Sir, I just want to talk to the art department.
Originally posted at englishbutter.substack.com.
Character: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Plot: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Prose: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ (I always forget how much Paolini loves making people tttrot~)
OVERALL: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
My ridiculously long essay about this book, hosted on Substack, can be found at the URL at the end of this review.
Let it be known that, just like Eragon, Murtagh is not very bright. It must be from Mum’s side of the family.
I wanted this to be more than it was.
This was one of my most anticipated books of the year, but I’ve had mixed feelings on the whole affair since the announcement. Like many, The Inheritance Cycle was my all-time favourite series from when I was about nine to somewhere in my early teens, and Murtagh left such a huge impression on me as a kid that his archetype (the angsty, angry, yet tragic bad boy loner with parental issues) is still one of my favourite things ever; I cannot stress how much the one proper chapter he has in Eldest drove me feral between the two years of my reading it and Brisingr’s release. That being said, I think the magic for the series started fading in my eyes with the release of Inheritance, which I didn’t love, and my admiration for Paolini as a writer dulled with his other novel To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, which I thought was pretty … meh; the only thing I could and can really say about it was, “yup, that was indeed a book I read”.
So I was excited to revisit my OG bad boy, he has so much potential from where we last saw him, but I was worried about Paolini’s ability to deliver a *good book*. And mixed feelings is a good way to put it now that I’ve finished.
Firstly, I adored getting to see Murtagh and Thorn’s psyches seventeen years after being introduced to them and deciding that these two would be my favourite poor little meow meows/blorbos (or whatever the kids say nowadays) forever. My throat did all the closing up and my heart ached whenever I read the passages about their experiences in Urû’baen at the hands of Galbatorix and his court. A shining beacon throughout the novel was in watching the two of them struggling with and addressing the trauma they experienced, most notable in Thorn’s fear of confined spaces and the ugly consequences that follow.
The book is very good at making me feel emotions for Murtagh and Thorn. But I wanted to feel, well, more. I wanted Murtagh to be a book about them navigating a post-Galbatorix landscape where they must deal with the fact that they’ve committed these atrocities, willingly or not. I wanted the main conflict to be centred around the fact that people don’t trust Murtagh and Thorn. I wanted a character-driven piece of storytelling.
Instead, the book is mostly a plot-driven sequel-setter. I’ve not been left a happy camper as it stumbles into the age-old sequel problem of oh shit, we need to escalate the stakes, and it’s decided to do this by introducing a Deep State, cheese-morality, Satanic Panic influenced, Westboro-fire-and-brimstone-esque Cthulhu cult that Murtagh and Thorn need to take out. But oops, we ran out of pages please buy the next book.
Man, when this was announced back in March, I thought was going to be a character study standalone D:
So, it’s an action-adventure book, it’s a book with all the swords and gore and magician duels of the previous books. It’s a winning formula, but, this time around, not for me. The characters stumble about from one plot point to the next through blind luck and by making strange (stupid) decisions, and I struggled to find a solid, motivational throughline for the events going on other than “we need to get the book to happen”. I found the main conflict centred around Bachel and her cult to be underwhelming at best, and downright boring at worst, and I just … I wanted more, and not in the way that more sequels! can fix.
In summary, Murtagh feels like a book teetering on the edge of having something to say, but never quite succeeding because instead of delving into what made Murtagh and Thorn so interesting in the first place, it’s more focused on doing, to be blunt about it, boring, tired, ill-thought out, and done-better-elsewhere plot things for later books. How can you have characters like Murtagh and Thorn, who have long been those with the most potential in the Cycle, and decide that this was the story that needed to be told about them? Setting them up to save the world isn’t why I found them interesting.
——
Criticisms from the original books that have been addressed and I am super happy about!
- The Empire is given more substance to it from the flat, evil entity it was in the previous books, hooray! The soldiers are talked about, the social classes are given more stage room, the economies and governments in cities and towns do exist; it was more than I was expecting upon coming into the book. Good job, I would like more, please.
- Murtagh is also, unlike Eragon, not ridiculously bloodthirsty. Sure, he is dangerous, but he’s not going about punching people so hard their hearts stop and coming away with the conclusion of “huh, I should change my knuckles to kill people even harder”, or “man, I wish I could kill a few more people for my literal murder mountain so I can have an even headcount of two hundred”. Murtagh and Eragon may be equally stupid, but at least Murtagh (mostly) escaped the psychopath gene that Eragon and Roran have.
However …
- Murtagh and Thorn’s relationship feels very much the same as Eragon and Saphira’s in that the Rider is definitely in charge and the dragon is, at best, a flying sidekick. Very frustrating. There are nice scenes between Murtagh and Thorn which show them as equals in the relationship, don’t get me wrong, and I love how they’re in each other’s corners, but Murtagh’s the one making the big decisions and calling the shots, with Thorn always going along with what Murtagh wants to do. So I’m not really sold on this being an equal partnership.
- We also return to the weirdly worded pseudo-medieval speak, and I’m still not a fan. Pls Chris. And whilst we’re on the subject of dialogue, can we stop with the written accents please. It’s so frustrating to read these “not-quite-Cockney-but-aping-on-something-vaguely-East-London”, are-youse-’avin-a-laff-at-me accents and I wish the trend would die. Just stop.
- Paolini still cannot write poetry and verse beyond the first two-ish lines of a stanza. I automatically skip these now because they’re the reading equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
- There is still a looot of filler going on here. Flying around filler, random musings filler, random worldbuilding filler, descriptions that are so lengthy that they become, for me at least, ineffective. This book could have easily been 100 pages shorter if the filler was either cut or strictly edited down. This is something I always forget is a thing when I pick up a Paolini book until I’m like, “Oh…. Yeah.”
I will read the next book because Murtagh and Thorn are my favourites, but can it reach the heights of its potential? Well, that’s up to Chris and his team at Knopf Books, now.
If you would like to read an utterly exhaustive, in-depth analysis on this book that dissects the plot, characters, and writing, you can find my heinously long essay on Substack below.
Also who decided that the world map at the front of the travel book would be in made-up runes? Sir, I just want to talk to the art department.
Originally posted at englishbutter.substack.com.
Character: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Plot: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
Prose: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
World: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
OVERALL: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
This is my review for the trilogy, which I’ve been slowly reading over the last couple of months.
Ashes of the Sun came to my attention sometime during its release in the pandemic for two reasons. Firstly, the gorgeous cover designs, specifically the UK’s choice to have it be in black and white with those striking splashes of red. But most honestly — it was the hand. I can’t get over how much I love it?? It and the whole illustration look so otherworldly and interesting, and when I look at it I grow happy and end up wishing I could draw hands like that; Scott M. Fischer killed it. Secondly, it was marketed on one of my bedrock favourite dynamics — childhood friends-to-enemies, more specifically in the form of estranged siblings. For these reasons the series has been on the back of my brain for at least two years, and I finally took the plunge once I decided I was sick of starting series and not finishing them; I needed to train myself to go do that again, dammit!
And so here we are. That’s two trilogies done this year, now I need to go back and mop up some of the others scattered through my list.
Not going to lie, I thought there would be more interpersonal drama than ended up happening, and that’s deflated some of my opinions. I can’t say which of the siblings I “liked” more, as I found both to be a little … slippery. The easiest to pinpoint a “why” on is Gyre, due to him not really having a character arc in the first book which had unfortunate knock-on effects for me across the second and third entries. I found myself thinking during that book that if I was the editor, I would have axed the prologue and held the reveal that Gyre and Maya were siblings until they met each other again as adults. As it stands, Gyre is always a guy who hates the Twilight Order and is never faced with the hard questions on what if he’s (sometimes) wrong about his position? Maya has this, but not Gyre, and that made me sad.
With Maya, I’m not as sure; I think I just wanted more exploration of what it means to her to be a centarch, as in, inner reflection from her of how she came to the Twilight Order? The story she was told by the Order vs. what Gyre tells her kinda gets brushed over and man, that has so much potential to dig up other aspects to her situation I can’t help but feel there was … I hate saying this, but wasted opportunity here. I thought she had interesting flaws in that she had difficulty accepting the complications of the world/not easily seeing things from other perspectives, something that ends up costing her dearly, but I don’t think she had enough opportunities to interact with outsiders and show this characterisation to its fullest potential, as the people she mostly interacts with are either those within the Twilight Order, or enemies she’s out to slay.
As for other characters, Kit annoyed me very much in the first book due to her Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl characterisation, but it did get better in the next two books once she had more people to dilute her page time. Varo was also fun with his stories about all his friends that either die or are awfully mutilated on the job. I also found the main antagonist of the series to be … okay. I don’t mind how he’s just some bad guy that needs to be dealt with, but I wish we got to see more of how his presence impacts the characters than ended up happening; one of my complaints with Emperor of Ruin are the flashbacks, the information of which I would have liked to have been delivered in a different manner.
Now, I’m pretty relaxed on worldbuilding in fantasy books. I’m equally happy with the five-minute crafts Abercrombie “the northern country is called the North and they speak Northern” approach as I am with the more elaborate Sanderson “here are fifty pages of characters musing on Alethi gender roles” style (actually I kid; please do not make me read fifty pages on made-up gender roles). So, imagine my absolute surprise when my favourite thing in this trilogy ended up being the world Wexler built. Four hundred years before the start of the story, a war between two factions called the Chosen and the Ghouls broke out. The Chosen wielded genetically disposed divine magic, and the Ghouls everyman biomagic. The sides wiped each other out, leaving behind a plague-ridden, gross-biomagic fallout post-apocalyptic fantasy world. But before the Chosen died out, they entrusted a group of humans capable of wielding divine magic to shepherd humankind as they did before; this group then became a Jedi-like order called the Twilight Order. What a playground to delve into! I loved the way the post-war politics shaped this story in the form of the Twilight Order, the government, and the rogue, fiercely independent Splinter Kingdoms. It was an amazing, interesting setup that other fantasy books only wished they could have the depths of, and I will be eagerly looking for more books with this much world potential in the future.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with these books and am glad I read them. I don’t think I’ll be rereading these any time in the future, but I will carry fond memories of the worldbuilding in particular.
Character: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Plot: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
Prose: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
World: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
OVERALL: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
This is my review for the trilogy, which I’ve been slowly reading over the last couple of months.
Ashes of the Sun came to my attention sometime during its release in the pandemic for two reasons. Firstly, the gorgeous cover designs, specifically the UK’s choice to have it be in black and white with those striking splashes of red. But most honestly — it was the hand. I can’t get over how much I love it?? It and the whole illustration look so otherworldly and interesting, and when I look at it I grow happy and end up wishing I could draw hands like that; Scott M. Fischer killed it. Secondly, it was marketed on one of my bedrock favourite dynamics — childhood friends-to-enemies, more specifically in the form of estranged siblings. For these reasons the series has been on the back of my brain for at least two years, and I finally took the plunge once I decided I was sick of starting series and not finishing them; I needed to train myself to go do that again, dammit!
And so here we are. That’s two trilogies done this year, now I need to go back and mop up some of the others scattered through my list.
Not going to lie, I thought there would be more interpersonal drama than ended up happening, and that’s deflated some of my opinions. I can’t say which of the siblings I “liked” more, as I found both to be a little … slippery. The easiest to pinpoint a “why” on is Gyre, due to him not really having a character arc in the first book which had unfortunate knock-on effects for me across the second and third entries. I found myself thinking during that book that if I was the editor, I would have axed the prologue and held the reveal that Gyre and Maya were siblings until they met each other again as adults. As it stands, Gyre is always a guy who hates the Twilight Order and is never faced with the hard questions on what if he’s (sometimes) wrong about his position? Maya has this, but not Gyre, and that made me sad.
With Maya, I’m not as sure; I think I just wanted more exploration of what it means to her to be a centarch, as in, inner reflection from her of how she came to the Twilight Order? The story she was told by the Order vs. what Gyre tells her kinda gets brushed over and man, that has so much potential to dig up other aspects to her situation I can’t help but feel there was … I hate saying this, but wasted opportunity here. I thought she had interesting flaws in that she had difficulty accepting the complications of the world/not easily seeing things from other perspectives, something that ends up costing her dearly, but I don’t think she had enough opportunities to interact with outsiders and show this characterisation to its fullest potential, as the people she mostly interacts with are either those within the Twilight Order, or enemies she’s out to slay.
As for other characters, Kit annoyed me very much in the first book due to her Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl characterisation, but it did get better in the next two books once she had more people to dilute her page time. Varo was also fun with his stories about all his friends that either die or are awfully mutilated on the job. I also found the main antagonist of the series to be … okay. I don’t mind how he’s just some bad guy that needs to be dealt with, but I wish we got to see more of how his presence impacts the characters than ended up happening; one of my complaints with Emperor of Ruin are the flashbacks, the information of which I would have liked to have been delivered in a different manner.
Now, I’m pretty relaxed on worldbuilding in fantasy books. I’m equally happy with the five-minute crafts Abercrombie “the northern country is called the North and they speak Northern” approach as I am with the more elaborate Sanderson “here are fifty pages of characters musing on Alethi gender roles” style (actually I kid; please do not make me read fifty pages on made-up gender roles). So, imagine my absolute surprise when my favourite thing in this trilogy ended up being the world Wexler built. Four hundred years before the start of the story, a war between two factions called the Chosen and the Ghouls broke out. The Chosen wielded genetically disposed divine magic, and the Ghouls everyman biomagic. The sides wiped each other out, leaving behind a plague-ridden, gross-biomagic fallout post-apocalyptic fantasy world. But before the Chosen died out, they entrusted a group of humans capable of wielding divine magic to shepherd humankind as they did before; this group then became a Jedi-like order called the Twilight Order. What a playground to delve into! I loved the way the post-war politics shaped this story in the form of the Twilight Order, the government, and the rogue, fiercely independent Splinter Kingdoms. It was an amazing, interesting setup that other fantasy books only wished they could have the depths of, and I will be eagerly looking for more books with this much world potential in the future.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with these books and am glad I read them. I don’t think I’ll be rereading these any time in the future, but I will carry fond memories of the worldbuilding in particular.
Character: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
Plot: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Prose: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
World: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
OVERALL: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
So this is just Dishonored but *checks quickly* uhhhhh not good?
Admittedly I picked this book up knowing it was going to be a hot pile of garbage (just the vibes, you know?), but my goodness. My goodness.
Firstly, the overarching conflict was so juvenile it was frustrating. Richard Swan, who's the author of The Justice of Kings, talked about how one of his frustrations with fantasy that led to worldbuilding and character choices in his book was that he noticed “sides” were presented as monoliths, i.e., everyone in the good kingdom is good, and everyone in the bad kingdom is bad. Granted, Richard's example was Tolkien, but damn, if that wasn't true for this book too. Everyone in the good kingdom is good and righteous, and everyone in the invading empire, down to the gruntiest of grunts, is a zealot for their God Emperor, and it doesn't ring true as to how humans work. Shades of grey are well and good in stories, and many don't need them, but it would have been nice to see some variety to characters on both sides, whether it be Guard #1026 screaming battle cries as he runs towards certain death, to the people caught in the middle who maybe put loyalty to their lives and themselves above loyalty to any one righteous cause.
Secondly, the religious aspect of this book was not handled well. I think the most frustrating thing about this was I thought Dalglish intended to write a sincere depiction of how religion plays into people's daily lives, and the pain they experience when it's been banned by an overpowering nation, but it comes off as someone who's very areligious and has been coasting along on those dang vibes again to write the book. The only theology that seems to be in place is “our dude/s are better than your dude/s and we'll prove it by killing you in a gruesome fashion”. I felt like the competing religions were treated more like sports teams which wasn't ... great.
Thirdly, there was a whole lot of logic lacking in this. Like, sure, the deposed heir assassinating his way back into power is like, a sick and timeless fantasy trope, but there are so many ways these characters could have strengthened that premise, you know? Just by asking some few, obvious questions or having some sense of empathy for people other than the main cast. The plan to make Cyrus the one and only Vagrant was ... questionable? If he's to hide behind a mask, make lots of them! Don't put all your eggs in one basket! Maybe that way you can help the people of Thanet in the meantime whilst you're training Cyrus up because he's the one who knows the secrets of the ones in power or something. I was disappointed. What happens if he refused to be trained? What happens if he dies on a mission through random bad luck? What if he quits because he can't stomach it anymore? Does your whole rebellion then fall apart? Again, it just felt like a lot of very simple questions were not thought about.
(Also made me laugh that this evil empire is intent on conquering a small island nation that has the same distance between itself and the empire's mainland that Europe and North America have, if it takes two to three months to reach it via sail.)
Finally, my other sticking point is that the narrative felt unfocused. The first and last parts felt solid, but the core of the book really did feel like a bunch of scenes mushed together until they were book length. I didn't feel much of a cause and effect going on; it was just characters running from gory scenario to gory scenario, only for them to wait and be directed towards the next bad guys they had to take down. It felt like a bunch of side quests? Lending to the unfocused feeling too were the number of POVs. I wouold have appreciated if these had been cut down to a handful.
Overall, even though I wasn't expecting much going in as, in my experience, assassin premises are executed more poorly than not (why is that anyway? It's weird that the only “good” assassin book/s I tend to hear about are the Night Angel ones (also provided you close your eyes to the sheer amount of rape going on in those)), I wish more thought was put into character and drama instead of sneaking, swordplay, and gore as I love assassin/rogue archetypes :(
Character: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
Plot: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Prose: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
World: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
OVERALL: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
So this is just Dishonored but *checks quickly* uhhhhh not good?
Admittedly I picked this book up knowing it was going to be a hot pile of garbage (just the vibes, you know?), but my goodness. My goodness.
Firstly, the overarching conflict was so juvenile it was frustrating. Richard Swan, who's the author of The Justice of Kings, talked about how one of his frustrations with fantasy that led to worldbuilding and character choices in his book was that he noticed “sides” were presented as monoliths, i.e., everyone in the good kingdom is good, and everyone in the bad kingdom is bad. Granted, Richard's example was Tolkien, but damn, if that wasn't true for this book too. Everyone in the good kingdom is good and righteous, and everyone in the invading empire, down to the gruntiest of grunts, is a zealot for their God Emperor, and it doesn't ring true as to how humans work. Shades of grey are well and good in stories, and many don't need them, but it would have been nice to see some variety to characters on both sides, whether it be Guard #1026 screaming battle cries as he runs towards certain death, to the people caught in the middle who maybe put loyalty to their lives and themselves above loyalty to any one righteous cause.
Secondly, the religious aspect of this book was not handled well. I think the most frustrating thing about this was I thought Dalglish intended to write a sincere depiction of how religion plays into people's daily lives, and the pain they experience when it's been banned by an overpowering nation, but it comes off as someone who's very areligious and has been coasting along on those dang vibes again to write the book. The only theology that seems to be in place is “our dude/s are better than your dude/s and we'll prove it by killing you in a gruesome fashion”. I felt like the competing religions were treated more like sports teams which wasn't ... great.
Thirdly, there was a whole lot of logic lacking in this. Like, sure, the deposed heir assassinating his way back into power is like, a sick and timeless fantasy trope, but there are so many ways these characters could have strengthened that premise, you know? Just by asking some few, obvious questions or having some sense of empathy for people other than the main cast. The plan to make Cyrus the one and only Vagrant was ... questionable? If he's to hide behind a mask, make lots of them! Don't put all your eggs in one basket! Maybe that way you can help the people of Thanet in the meantime whilst you're training Cyrus up because he's the one who knows the secrets of the ones in power or something. I was disappointed. What happens if he refused to be trained? What happens if he dies on a mission through random bad luck? What if he quits because he can't stomach it anymore? Does your whole rebellion then fall apart? Again, it just felt like a lot of very simple questions were not thought about.
(Also made me laugh that this evil empire is intent on conquering a small island nation that has the same distance between itself and the empire's mainland that Europe and North America have, if it takes two to three months to reach it via sail.)
Finally, my other sticking point is that the narrative felt unfocused. The first and last parts felt solid, but the core of the book really did feel like a bunch of scenes mushed together until they were book length. I didn't feel much of a cause and effect going on; it was just characters running from gory scenario to gory scenario, only for them to wait and be directed towards the next bad guys they had to take down. It felt like a bunch of side quests? Lending to the unfocused feeling too were the number of POVs. I wouold have appreciated if these had been cut down to a handful.
Overall, even though I wasn't expecting much going in as, in my experience, assassin premises are executed more poorly than not (why is that anyway? It's weird that the only “good” assassin book/s I tend to hear about are the Night Angel ones (also provided you close your eyes to the sheer amount of rape going on in those)), I wish more thought was put into character and drama instead of sneaking, swordplay, and gore as I love assassin/rogue archetypes :(
Character: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Plot: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Prose: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
World: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
OVERALL: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
I didn’t like this one at all, folks 😔🙌 After the first few chapters I was thinking this might be a two-star read, but as the book went on and I started to have more problems with it, I had to adjust my rating. This book didn’t work for me at all, and no one’s sadder about it than me.
If you want a digestible, bloody, dragon rider fantasy adventure, Dragon Rider might be right up your alley. To quickly clear the air too, Fourth Wing comes up a lot in the marketing as Dragon Rider seems to be targeting the audience that wanted a darker, less romance-heavy slant to Fourth Wing, but it’s much closer to Eragon than Fourth Wing; the only thing the books have in common are human-dragon bonded partnerships. I’d recommend Dragon Rider more to 1) those who haven’t read a huge amount of what I’ll call “traditional” adult fantasy (i.e., not Romantasy), 2) people who liked The Inheritance Cycle and are searching for more of the same, and 3) people who want to venture into adult fantasy spaces from YA ones and like the gritty aesthetics of Game of Thrones. I know I wanted the bite, edge, and smarts of Thrones, which Dragon Rider clearly takes large inspiration from, but didn’t find here.
Dragon Rider is Taran Matharu’s first adult book. His previous YA books have been hugely successful, and I was excited to see how he would transition to the adult market as hey, that’s the one I know best and like the most. But unfortunately, my familiarity with the genre seems to have hindered more than helped. I’ve seen most of the ideas in this book done better elsewhere, and many of my issues can be summed up as “YA logic, adult language and situations”, which creates a jarring contrast. It desperately wants to have that adult complexity, which it will remind you of by throwing blood, guts, viscera, swearing, and nudity and sex at you willy nilly, but Matharu doesn’t yet have the ability to execute the vision I think he was aiming for. I constantly found myself thinking, “no real human person would act like this” as we learnt more of how Jai and his brothers are treated as hostages, people get away with the most insane things with nary a shrug, warnings of conspiracies are constantly ignored or given very low priority, plans succeed because of flimsy happenstance rather than actual effort, and no one is capable of thinking beyond the next couple of hours. I went from baffled, to annoyed, to tired as stuff just kept happening because plot.
Our protagonist is Jai, son of a king who fought and lost against the aggressively expanding Sabine Empire. Jai and his elder brothers were taken as hostages by the empire as children, with eyes towards reconciliation and friendship with the defeated Steppefolk once the eldest comes of age and can return to rule them. As the third son, Jai is tasked with caring for the elderly once-emperor who killed his father.
More than a decade after his father’s death, Jai is seventeen, and a marriage is being arranged between the Sabine and Dansk royal families. The Dansk (which is just Danish for … Danish) are a pop culture Viking/fantasy barbarian peoples who form soulbonds with dragons, and the alliance will not only bring peace to the empire, but give it the power of dragons. This seems like a bad idea. Yet shenanigans are afoot, and this wedding might not go as smoothly as all parties are hoping.
Firstly, the pacing in this book is wack; like, I have not seen pacing this bad in a long time. Too much time is spent on unimportant events so everything feels lopsided and extremely slow. I felt like I read a really, really long first act, a really flat second act, and then a third act that I guess? It sure sprung in from the off-screen. The transition being “random poison from off-screen go!” is half-confusing, half-hilarious because it just happens with no build-up. I’m left scratching my head wondering where the editing team was for this one. The first third involves political machinations and scheming around this wedding and alliance, which leads to the coup described in the blurb (yes, it takes 1/3rd of the book to arrive at the inciting incident!), after which Jai escapes with the dragon egg that later hatches after he literally stumbles over it on his way out the door. What happened to that stealing the blurb mentioned? See: stuff just happening because. I wouldn’t mind this pacing so much if the political machinations were interesting enough to make up for it, but they’re not. It’s a very generic power grab by the comically evil prince to take the throne for reasons of power and empire expansion, but he doesn’t seem to have a solid plan beyond the Underpants Gnomes Step 1: Coup, Step 2: ???, Step 3: Profit! model (not to mention his timing of this coup is Extremely Illogical and Dumb). The people who follow him don’t have any solid reasons to help him either beyond being generically evil drones. The people who die in the coup only die because they sleepwalked into the entire affair; I mean, the warnings they get are met with the attitude of “hmm! Interesting! We shall consider what you said”, and then everyone is shocked when the coup happens. I wanted to shake everyone involved, but especially Jai. Telling one person there is a problem and then wiping your hands of it does not solve anything!
The aesthetics of Game of Thrones, but not much of the smarts, as it doesn’t seem to understand why its violence and sex works so well. Instead, it has only co-opted its imagery, which is a common trap Thrones inspired works fall into.
Speaking of smarts, Jai, frankly put, is an idiot of colossal proportions. He constantly makes the wrong decisions, to which the book is oblivious, and often fails to put two and two together that by the time he does figure out the answers to proposed questions, you the reader have been shouting those answers at him for possibly hundreds of pages. Aside from fumbling his way through a plot that was happening to him, I also found him to be an inconsistent character. One example of this relates to the very first page. He’s described as “hating” the old emperor Leonid because the guy killed his father (understandable), and Jai doesn’t relish his position of having to be this elderly man’s carer, but after the coup shenanigans happen, Jai says he loved Leonid like a father-figure. So like … which is it?
The rest of the cast can be neatly slotted into stereotypical archetypes. Not only do we have the cruel and ambitiously evil prince, but the corrupt and comically evil paladin, the icy and beautiful not-like-other-girls warrior princess, the gruffly drunk-but-competant mentor who was once a warrior like the main character, etc. I know these archetypes, not these characters, and as such I quickly grew tired of them. The situations these characters find themselves in are convoluted so, for example, exposition can be delivered and worldbuilding shown off. Which is incredibly distracting? I don’t see why any sane person would drag another on a city-wide tour just to throw them off a tower to kill them when they could, instead, just take the guy around the back wall and stab him. Your orders were just to kill him, dude. Just kill him. Please.
You can say fuck and cunt as many times as you want, kill babies and have Red Weddings galore, and worldbuild to your heart’s content, but it won’t make the book adult when the story’s conflict is firmly rooted in “and then and then and then” logic, tired stock characters, and almost no changing dynamics, rather than “therefore, but” logic supported by rounded characters with beefing personalities.
Following the daring escape from the palace, Jai, and now the baby dragon Winter, run about for a bit until they find not-like-other-girls Frida and go through a training and travelling montage that reminded me of an RPG with its talk of how to acquire mana and levelling up (which takes up another third of the book; as mentioned above, the pacing is a huge issue, because this should have all happened in the first third) before falling into an action climax that I didn’t much care about the outcome of. The book ends with an invite to tune in next time, but I will not be tuning in next time, I’m sorry to say.
But one of the biggest story sins Dragon Rider committed was how it bent over backwards to keep Jai as the protagonist when it should have been Frida, as all of the important beats affect her more than him. As a non-spoiler explainer, there were several points where it made more sense for Frida to do things that she just doesn’t so stuff can happen to her for Jai to deal with. And for those of you hunting for spoilers, I mean things like Frida not doing enough with the warning Jai gives her about the coup just so the coup can happen, her getting over her dragon’s death extremely quickly so Jai can spend more of the narration bonding with Winter, and hiding the soulgem in her mouth for days only to give it to Jai so he can become a more powerful Soulbound when she could have swallowed it before they arrived at the prison camp and so avoided the whole thing. If anything, Jai is random collateral swept up in a story about Frida.
In summary: Dragon Rider will probably be a miss if you’re a fantasy veteran. The book relies on common tropes that are played straight, has the bark of Thrones but not the bite, and there are simply more challenging books out there to read. If you’re new to the genre, or not as demanding of it as me, you’ll probably get more out of this book that I did.
I’m still hunting for the book that will be able to scratch my Eragon itch, as unfortunately it was not this one. Maybe I’ll give Of Blood and Fire another shot….
Footnote: I have one more personal gripe that I couldn’t really fit in above. I found the short chapters aggravating. Whole scenes would be split into three chapters for no reason. Why was this decision made? I feel like this extends from the author’s Wattpad days, so I just … You know you’re allowed to write chapters that are more than four pages long, right? You’re trad publishing, you’re not following an update schedule. Just make the scene into one chapter. Please. And thank you.
Character: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Plot: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Prose: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
World: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
OVERALL: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
I didn’t like this one at all, folks 😔🙌 After the first few chapters I was thinking this might be a two-star read, but as the book went on and I started to have more problems with it, I had to adjust my rating. This book didn’t work for me at all, and no one’s sadder about it than me.
If you want a digestible, bloody, dragon rider fantasy adventure, Dragon Rider might be right up your alley. To quickly clear the air too, Fourth Wing comes up a lot in the marketing as Dragon Rider seems to be targeting the audience that wanted a darker, less romance-heavy slant to Fourth Wing, but it’s much closer to Eragon than Fourth Wing; the only thing the books have in common are human-dragon bonded partnerships. I’d recommend Dragon Rider more to 1) those who haven’t read a huge amount of what I’ll call “traditional” adult fantasy (i.e., not Romantasy), 2) people who liked The Inheritance Cycle and are searching for more of the same, and 3) people who want to venture into adult fantasy spaces from YA ones and like the gritty aesthetics of Game of Thrones. I know I wanted the bite, edge, and smarts of Thrones, which Dragon Rider clearly takes large inspiration from, but didn’t find here.
Dragon Rider is Taran Matharu’s first adult book. His previous YA books have been hugely successful, and I was excited to see how he would transition to the adult market as hey, that’s the one I know best and like the most. But unfortunately, my familiarity with the genre seems to have hindered more than helped. I’ve seen most of the ideas in this book done better elsewhere, and many of my issues can be summed up as “YA logic, adult language and situations”, which creates a jarring contrast. It desperately wants to have that adult complexity, which it will remind you of by throwing blood, guts, viscera, swearing, and nudity and sex at you willy nilly, but Matharu doesn’t yet have the ability to execute the vision I think he was aiming for. I constantly found myself thinking, “no real human person would act like this” as we learnt more of how Jai and his brothers are treated as hostages, people get away with the most insane things with nary a shrug, warnings of conspiracies are constantly ignored or given very low priority, plans succeed because of flimsy happenstance rather than actual effort, and no one is capable of thinking beyond the next couple of hours. I went from baffled, to annoyed, to tired as stuff just kept happening because plot.
Our protagonist is Jai, son of a king who fought and lost against the aggressively expanding Sabine Empire. Jai and his elder brothers were taken as hostages by the empire as children, with eyes towards reconciliation and friendship with the defeated Steppefolk once the eldest comes of age and can return to rule them. As the third son, Jai is tasked with caring for the elderly once-emperor who killed his father.
More than a decade after his father’s death, Jai is seventeen, and a marriage is being arranged between the Sabine and Dansk royal families. The Dansk (which is just Danish for … Danish) are a pop culture Viking/fantasy barbarian peoples who form soulbonds with dragons, and the alliance will not only bring peace to the empire, but give it the power of dragons. This seems like a bad idea. Yet shenanigans are afoot, and this wedding might not go as smoothly as all parties are hoping.
Firstly, the pacing in this book is wack; like, I have not seen pacing this bad in a long time. Too much time is spent on unimportant events so everything feels lopsided and extremely slow. I felt like I read a really, really long first act, a really flat second act, and then a third act that I guess? It sure sprung in from the off-screen. The transition being “random poison from off-screen go!” is half-confusing, half-hilarious because it just happens with no build-up. I’m left scratching my head wondering where the editing team was for this one. The first third involves political machinations and scheming around this wedding and alliance, which leads to the coup described in the blurb (yes, it takes 1/3rd of the book to arrive at the inciting incident!), after which Jai escapes with the dragon egg that later hatches after he literally stumbles over it on his way out the door. What happened to that stealing the blurb mentioned? See: stuff just happening because. I wouldn’t mind this pacing so much if the political machinations were interesting enough to make up for it, but they’re not. It’s a very generic power grab by the comically evil prince to take the throne for reasons of power and empire expansion, but he doesn’t seem to have a solid plan beyond the Underpants Gnomes Step 1: Coup, Step 2: ???, Step 3: Profit! model (not to mention his timing of this coup is Extremely Illogical and Dumb). The people who follow him don’t have any solid reasons to help him either beyond being generically evil drones. The people who die in the coup only die because they sleepwalked into the entire affair; I mean, the warnings they get are met with the attitude of “hmm! Interesting! We shall consider what you said”, and then everyone is shocked when the coup happens. I wanted to shake everyone involved, but especially Jai. Telling one person there is a problem and then wiping your hands of it does not solve anything!
The aesthetics of Game of Thrones, but not much of the smarts, as it doesn’t seem to understand why its violence and sex works so well. Instead, it has only co-opted its imagery, which is a common trap Thrones inspired works fall into.
Speaking of smarts, Jai, frankly put, is an idiot of colossal proportions. He constantly makes the wrong decisions, to which the book is oblivious, and often fails to put two and two together that by the time he does figure out the answers to proposed questions, you the reader have been shouting those answers at him for possibly hundreds of pages. Aside from fumbling his way through a plot that was happening to him, I also found him to be an inconsistent character. One example of this relates to the very first page. He’s described as “hating” the old emperor Leonid because the guy killed his father (understandable), and Jai doesn’t relish his position of having to be this elderly man’s carer, but after the coup shenanigans happen, Jai says he loved Leonid like a father-figure. So like … which is it?
The rest of the cast can be neatly slotted into stereotypical archetypes. Not only do we have the cruel and ambitiously evil prince, but the corrupt and comically evil paladin, the icy and beautiful not-like-other-girls warrior princess, the gruffly drunk-but-competant mentor who was once a warrior like the main character, etc. I know these archetypes, not these characters, and as such I quickly grew tired of them. The situations these characters find themselves in are convoluted so, for example, exposition can be delivered and worldbuilding shown off. Which is incredibly distracting? I don’t see why any sane person would drag another on a city-wide tour just to throw them off a tower to kill them when they could, instead, just take the guy around the back wall and stab him. Your orders were just to kill him, dude. Just kill him. Please.
You can say fuck and cunt as many times as you want, kill babies and have Red Weddings galore, and worldbuild to your heart’s content, but it won’t make the book adult when the story’s conflict is firmly rooted in “and then and then and then” logic, tired stock characters, and almost no changing dynamics, rather than “therefore, but” logic supported by rounded characters with beefing personalities.
Following the daring escape from the palace, Jai, and now the baby dragon Winter, run about for a bit until they find not-like-other-girls Frida and go through a training and travelling montage that reminded me of an RPG with its talk of how to acquire mana and levelling up (which takes up another third of the book; as mentioned above, the pacing is a huge issue, because this should have all happened in the first third) before falling into an action climax that I didn’t much care about the outcome of. The book ends with an invite to tune in next time, but I will not be tuning in next time, I’m sorry to say.
But one of the biggest story sins Dragon Rider committed was how it bent over backwards to keep Jai as the protagonist when it should have been Frida, as all of the important beats affect her more than him. As a non-spoiler explainer, there were several points where it made more sense for Frida to do things that she just doesn’t so stuff can happen to her for Jai to deal with. And for those of you hunting for spoilers, I mean things like Frida not doing enough with the warning Jai gives her about the coup just so the coup can happen, her getting over her dragon’s death extremely quickly so Jai can spend more of the narration bonding with Winter, and hiding the soulgem in her mouth for days only to give it to Jai so he can become a more powerful Soulbound when she could have swallowed it before they arrived at the prison camp and so avoided the whole thing. If anything, Jai is random collateral swept up in a story about Frida.
In summary: Dragon Rider will probably be a miss if you’re a fantasy veteran. The book relies on common tropes that are played straight, has the bark of Thrones but not the bite, and there are simply more challenging books out there to read. If you’re new to the genre, or not as demanding of it as me, you’ll probably get more out of this book that I did.
I’m still hunting for the book that will be able to scratch my Eragon itch, as unfortunately it was not this one. Maybe I’ll give Of Blood and Fire another shot….
Footnote: I have one more personal gripe that I couldn’t really fit in above. I found the short chapters aggravating. Whole scenes would be split into three chapters for no reason. Why was this decision made? I feel like this extends from the author’s Wattpad days, so I just … You know you’re allowed to write chapters that are more than four pages long, right? You’re trad publishing, you’re not following an update schedule. Just make the scene into one chapter. Please. And thank you.
Character: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
Plot: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Prose: ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆
World: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
OVERALL: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
I loved this one. I actually read the first 25% of this book in 2022, but found I wasn’t in the mood for it. I came back to it a few days ago, skim-reading to catch myself back up on what had previously happened, and regular-reading a couple of pages here and there whilst I was waiting in line at the shops or cooking dinner.
Then I inhaled the remaining 75% in one day.
Well, Larkwood’s now an auto-buy author for me. I’m so excited to see what she comes out with in the future because her prose is such a treat. I’ve found it to be unique amongst the current ranks of 2020s Epic Fantasy trad publishing, and the closest I can compare it to is Tamsyn Muir’s (which I guess is why she’s got a pull quote on the front!). If you like The Locked Tomb, The Serpent Gates has a lot in common with it, from the necromancy aspects, to the humour, to the gays.
I read most of this book in one day simply because I found it that fun to read. My dirty secret about the first book is that I thought I would like it more than I did, and my fondness for it is for the vibes rather than the content so far as I remember it, but after having such a great experience with this one I’m curious to see my thoughts on it now. Maybe, like when I tried to read The Thousand Eyes in 2022, I wasn’t in the right mood for it and it impacted my ratings. I’ll re-read it one day, but Mount TBR is calling.
One of the only faults I can put to the prose is that it relies a bit too much on similes, but so many of them are delights to read that I didn’t care as much as I might have had they been weaker.
The sarcophagus was a great cube of unclouded marble, so white and still that it looked as though a hole had been cut into the universe to show a blank page beyond it.
-
When Tsereg opened the book, a letter fluttered out. They unfolded it and made a quiet, sad little noise, like the sound of a snail being stepped on.
But whilst this book centres around unholy Lovecraftian horrors beyond mortal ken, it’s also written in a casually funny voice that’s balanced by unexpectedly profound moments most visible, to me, in Tal’s POVs.
He closed his eyes, pressing closer, hoping it might make him feel steadier, or more certain of what he had done. He didn’t know how to find his footing. There was still that terrible familiar vacancy, an emptiness without definition. This was supposed to have fixed things. He was supposed to feel better.
Now that I have gushed enough about the prose, let’s focus on characters, plot, and world.
So, the biggest problems these characters have to grapple with is the question of dilemmas. As in, there’s rarely one good path to follow so they must take the choice between two sucky ones. Which I think more characters need to do, because there are a lot of hard decisions being made in my reads, and bad choices too (whether it be on purpose or plain idiotic), but I haven’t been finding a lot of dilemmas, which is probably just me not picking my books correctly, but ah well. Following the end of the previous book, Csorwe and Shuthmili have successfully escaped the people who controlled them through debts of gratitude, duty, and tradition, and are now in possession of their own destinies, until their old lives come to drag them back under in the form of Belthandros Sethennai, that bastard.
The most interesting stories were of Csorwe and Shuthmili, the first of who is taken out of commission for much of this book and the second who is trying to get her back into commission. The stakes were high with this one as it centred around one of those pesky dilemmas and demands the characters answer questions about how far have they really come from their roots, and can they even escape them in the end? Delicious.
This is reflected in Tal too, what with his history with all kinds of relationships. I enjoyed Tal’s subplot, and he was definitely the funniest character to follow, but I still found myself wanting to see what happened to other characters more simply because their plots were more tied to the stakes of what’s been stressed as important in this setting … mainly, that the setting functions and doesn’t start getting sucked into a cosmic horror void of madness.
“Yeah, I have some money,” he said to the girl. “It’s in my pockets. You’ll have to let me go.”
“All right. Maybe,” she said to Tal. “When I do that, you need to take off your coat and put it on the floor.”
“Why should I do that?” said Tal. “You know, this isn’t the first time someone’s tried to rob me, but I’ve never had to talk them through it before.”
But for all of the entwining stories, they manage to make matters of such importance to the universe’s health and make its fate rest on the shoulders of a few people’s emotionally charged decisions, which means the stakes are high, folks.
Like with my memories of The Unspoken Name, this book has a lot to get through for the page count. Am I just used to my Fantasys taking much more time to get places? Probably! The Thousand Eyes takes liberal application of timeskips and getting from one place to another in a matter of words, but it’s all done with such grace and humour I felt comfortable pinging around like this.
Overall, I very much enjoyed my time with this book and I will definitely be re-reading the first book at some point in the future. A.K. Larkwood, ya killed it, can’t wait to see what you put out next.
Character: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
Plot: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Prose: ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆
World: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
OVERALL: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
I loved this one. I actually read the first 25% of this book in 2022, but found I wasn’t in the mood for it. I came back to it a few days ago, skim-reading to catch myself back up on what had previously happened, and regular-reading a couple of pages here and there whilst I was waiting in line at the shops or cooking dinner.
Then I inhaled the remaining 75% in one day.
Well, Larkwood’s now an auto-buy author for me. I’m so excited to see what she comes out with in the future because her prose is such a treat. I’ve found it to be unique amongst the current ranks of 2020s Epic Fantasy trad publishing, and the closest I can compare it to is Tamsyn Muir’s (which I guess is why she’s got a pull quote on the front!). If you like The Locked Tomb, The Serpent Gates has a lot in common with it, from the necromancy aspects, to the humour, to the gays.
I read most of this book in one day simply because I found it that fun to read. My dirty secret about the first book is that I thought I would like it more than I did, and my fondness for it is for the vibes rather than the content so far as I remember it, but after having such a great experience with this one I’m curious to see my thoughts on it now. Maybe, like when I tried to read The Thousand Eyes in 2022, I wasn’t in the right mood for it and it impacted my ratings. I’ll re-read it one day, but Mount TBR is calling.
One of the only faults I can put to the prose is that it relies a bit too much on similes, but so many of them are delights to read that I didn’t care as much as I might have had they been weaker.
The sarcophagus was a great cube of unclouded marble, so white and still that it looked as though a hole had been cut into the universe to show a blank page beyond it.
-
When Tsereg opened the book, a letter fluttered out. They unfolded it and made a quiet, sad little noise, like the sound of a snail being stepped on.
But whilst this book centres around unholy Lovecraftian horrors beyond mortal ken, it’s also written in a casually funny voice that’s balanced by unexpectedly profound moments most visible, to me, in Tal’s POVs.
He closed his eyes, pressing closer, hoping it might make him feel steadier, or more certain of what he had done. He didn’t know how to find his footing. There was still that terrible familiar vacancy, an emptiness without definition. This was supposed to have fixed things. He was supposed to feel better.
Now that I have gushed enough about the prose, let’s focus on characters, plot, and world.
So, the biggest problems these characters have to grapple with is the question of dilemmas. As in, there’s rarely one good path to follow so they must take the choice between two sucky ones. Which I think more characters need to do, because there are a lot of hard decisions being made in my reads, and bad choices too (whether it be on purpose or plain idiotic), but I haven’t been finding a lot of dilemmas, which is probably just me not picking my books correctly, but ah well. Following the end of the previous book, Csorwe and Shuthmili have successfully escaped the people who controlled them through debts of gratitude, duty, and tradition, and are now in possession of their own destinies, until their old lives come to drag them back under in the form of Belthandros Sethennai, that bastard.
The most interesting stories were of Csorwe and Shuthmili, the first of who is taken out of commission for much of this book and the second who is trying to get her back into commission. The stakes were high with this one as it centred around one of those pesky dilemmas and demands the characters answer questions about how far have they really come from their roots, and can they even escape them in the end? Delicious.
This is reflected in Tal too, what with his history with all kinds of relationships. I enjoyed Tal’s subplot, and he was definitely the funniest character to follow, but I still found myself wanting to see what happened to other characters more simply because their plots were more tied to the stakes of what’s been stressed as important in this setting … mainly, that the setting functions and doesn’t start getting sucked into a cosmic horror void of madness.
“Yeah, I have some money,” he said to the girl. “It’s in my pockets. You’ll have to let me go.”
“All right. Maybe,” she said to Tal. “When I do that, you need to take off your coat and put it on the floor.”
“Why should I do that?” said Tal. “You know, this isn’t the first time someone’s tried to rob me, but I’ve never had to talk them through it before.”
But for all of the entwining stories, they manage to make matters of such importance to the universe’s health and make its fate rest on the shoulders of a few people’s emotionally charged decisions, which means the stakes are high, folks.
Like with my memories of The Unspoken Name, this book has a lot to get through for the page count. Am I just used to my Fantasys taking much more time to get places? Probably! The Thousand Eyes takes liberal application of timeskips and getting from one place to another in a matter of words, but it’s all done with such grace and humour I felt comfortable pinging around like this.
Overall, I very much enjoyed my time with this book and I will definitely be re-reading the first book at some point in the future. A.K. Larkwood, ya killed it, can’t wait to see what you put out next.
