jules

finished reading the story on 15 september, went back and read introduction+translation notes

so glad i finally read this... ive always known the story but never read an actual text and this edition/translation is so fun. maybe one day ill try read a different translation... though i dont know if i could ever read an unabridged edition LOL. i love monky

1.5 stars you know i did really want to like this but unfortunately it's not very good u__u i understand that it's hard to pack everything you want to explore in a barely 100-page novella, but the book felt underwhelming to me. prose was amateur-ish (no subtlety, remember show don't tell?) and some dialogue/story beats were a little corny.

however it WAS nice to see all the viet names with the accents and everything. i've not read any viet-inspired fantasy stuff before which is the main reason i picked this book up.

so... even though i didn't like it very much i appreciate what it was trying to do, and again it's just nice to see viet characters even if in this case they're bland and frustrating. OH WELL

started this as a joke to see how bad it was. managed to get 4 chapters in...

really just terrible. prose is horribly amateurish and reads like a teenager's wattpad fanfic, overuse of ellipses is so so irritating, protagonist is insufferable (“I was the Maiden. The Chosen.” ohhh i didn't catch that the other ten times you mentioned it thank goodness you said it again), and what kind of fucking name is PENELLAPHE?

dynamic between poppy and hawke is also sooo uncomfortable lol. i know the plot twist and i will just never see that kind of dynamic as romantic (thousand-year-old immortal whisks away a barely 18-year old girl who is also a virgin and he was her first kiss and i assume also her first time bla bla bla). creepy very creepy

just going to assume everyone rating this above 2 stars is like, clinically insane or something. get well soon! and i mean that genuinely!!!

my individual ratings:
- the finder: 4☆
- darkrose and diamond: 3☆
- the bones of the earth: 3.5☆
- on the high marsh: 5☆
- dragonfly: 4☆

short and fun october read. i love toxic yuri

i really really liked this book. i wish it was longer!!!

i agree that it could've/should've been a full novel. some parts of the story deserved to be fleshed out more, and occasionally it felt a bit infodump-y. also, i really don't think it should be marketed as a wuxia LOL.

but i love the setting, love the dialogue, and love the characters!!! tet sang my beloved <3 great read. definitely something i'll reread again and again.

3.5 stars
i dont think it's a perfect book but i loved the ending, loved the new characters and loved the contemplativeness of the story. didnt love so much the age gap between seserakh and lebannen... it's the same issue i have with ged and tenar, but at least those two don't get together until they're middle aged after having been apart for a long time.

my criticisms with the book mostly lie in how meandering it feels at times, and also how dialogue-heavy it can be in comparison with the other books. it also felt a little exposition-y at times, which makes sense when you remember it was published a long time after ‘a wizard,' but as someone who's been devouring the entire series over a couple months, the exposition felt a little heavy-handed.
and, yes... the fact that there are only two major female characters who aren't secretly dragons and they're both white women is... now i love ursula but that is a very white woman thing to do.

but! that aside, the ending is really perfect to me. it ties everything up really nicely, and i'm glad ursula wrote more after tehanu was titled the ‘last' book of earthsea. in all i just adore this world and i'm glad i finally read these books

I FINALLY FINISHED THIS. half of the book was such a slog to get through and i honestly would have dnf'd if i didn't buy the entire trilogy at once like an insane person. still not sure why i did that, but at least now i probably won't sell the books like i was thinking of doing until this one finally picked up.

the worldbuilding and setting is the strongest part of this novel for sure– characters felt a little flat (love Hilo though), and the prose occasionally got on my nerves in the way of its VEHEMENT insistence on telling and not showing. it sort of felt like the author didn't have much faith in her readers to parse subtleties without explicitly just writing it out. an example:

“[Lan] was worried about Anden. The young man was like a true nephew to him, and Lan felt a great deal of responsibility for him.”

okay im ngl it bored me at times. but the prose is very pretty and i enjoyed the format ^_^

teenage me never finished reading this. it must've not been very good

it takes a while to get going but it does pick up at around ~150 pages or so. nevertheless those first couple of chapters are an absolute slog to get through and could have used a lot more tightening up.

so! i finished this in 3 days... i'd heard this was a japanese-inspired fantasy standalone with magic similar to avatar: the last airbender, which got me interested. and overall... it was alright. first, my biggest gripe: the amount of just straight-up japanese. the author is east asian but not japanese, which explains sooo much. was there anything added by making characters count, “ichi! ni! san!” instead of just writing it as “one! two! three!” ? was there any need for the string of japanese sentences in the last chapter, even with the excuse of a character translating for someone else? why have characters use japanese phrases/expressions like “ano” when you're just going to write them saying “um” a couple pages later? it felt very... weeb-y. sorry. the dialogue being in italics if it was being spoken in a different language/dialect was also grating as hell, but you get used to it.

anyway that's not even mentioning the amount of in-universe jargon this book has. i read this on an e-reader and i was NOT about to flip back and forth between my page and the glossary every couple of seconds to see what the hell a numu or jijakalu (there's no ‘lu' sound in japanese btw) was. and what on earth was the point of inventing new units of measurement? all it did was overcomplicate things!

anyhow... i have other criticisms. the strange reverse-racism/reverse imperialists part of the worldbuilding left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth; making the stand-in for koreans an oppressor of the stand-in for the japanese was certainly... a choice. the eugenics element of the worldbuilding is also never really interrogated or dismantled. it's just there. also, i still hate takeru and think he should have killed himself. idgaf. piece of shit father, piece of shit husband, he didn't deserve any of the understanding or forgiveness he got at the end. him being abused by his father doesn't justify AT ALL how he treated misaki or his children, and, inb4 “he learned from his mistakes and is trying to be a better person,” I don't care. Guards, kill this clown.

the story, on the whole, wraps up in a weird spot. it's a standalone supposedly, but the story threads about the assassins goes nowhere by the end of the book and the implications of the ending (an army of elemental orphans?) feels more like the beginning of a series than it does a satisfying conclusion to a fantasy novel. overall, it just felt very... abrupt. the beginning should have been trimmed down to service what Wang wanted to do with the ending, or the story should have ended before everything just slides back from the fantastic action sequences to more dull monologues and info-dumping. speaking of info dumping... that history lecture in chapter 2 is ridiculous and almost made me dnf the book. but i guess one terribly-executed info dump wasn't enough, because later on there's a chapter dedicated to characters just talking about their religions. like why is this here?

Lol when i started writing this i had rated it 3 stars but i had to bump it down to 2.5 because of how many things annoyed me. however i do think the action sequences/fights were written well and some of the character work (misaki in particular) was very good. i'm not sure why people don't like misaki? maybe she's not the most likeable character but to me she's a very very compelling and interesting character (although i really had to suspend my disbelief when her backstory revealed that she and her friends, at 14 years old, were fighting fully-grown adult criminals and WINNING...) also i'm not going to pretend like i didn't cry, because i did. misaki and mamoru's relationship was so moving and her grief at losing him and wishing she had loved him better made me BAWL. so in all... 2.5/5. thought i would've liked it better, but oh well. it is what it is.

most anticlimactic final fight ive ever read. i did enjoy it though even if the pacing REALLY starts to suffer towards the end. i feel like it would have been better to split this into a trilogy or something. also people are NOT lying about the first 100 or so pages being a slog... once you get past that it's a lot more enjoyable to read in my opinion.

favourite character/POV was ead & her POV was definitely the author's favourite too LOL. the other narrators don't get as much attention as they should have, especially tané. can't help but feel that niclays was unneeded. loth is fine.

worldbuilding is cool, but the east feels a little caricature-y at times. for the west, i like the whole ‘religion founded upon a questionable myth' thing. the concept of the priory is really cool too.

overall it's a pretty good book even though i have my gripes with it. may or may not read the prequel

3.5 stars
very heavy and sobering and different from the last three books. but i enjoyed it.