Die Königin der Flammen

Oh what a disappointment. The final book in the Raven's Shadow unfortunately loses so much of what made the first two books so brilliant - namely the intimacy and the characters. Blood Song and Tower Lord really were text book examples in character work - building the main characters in the story in a way that really engaged me as a reader. You got to feel their motivations strongly and understand what drove them. Unfortunately, we lose that completely here as the series gets lost in its own mythology and attempts to sprawl into an epic but just ends up muddled.

We pick up pretty much were we left off in Tower Lord - Alltor has been relieved by Al Sorna and the Volarians are on the back foot. Rather than keep the focus on the defense of the Unified Realm, this story now spins off into a giant assault of Volaria. This seems scarcely believable - a nation ruined by war suddenly launching an all out and successful assault on the largest and most powerful empire in this world? The Volarians go from being powerful warriors with the ability to inflict severe damage to little more than a road hump.

Whilst all this is going on, Vaelin, probably the best character is sent on some random quest up in the north and that section where he is walking across the ice drags in a most unfortunate way. The increase in the scale of the conflict and the scattering of the main characters has lead to the engagement dropping off unfortunately.

Don't get me wrong, and I know I have been hyper critical in this review so far, this is still not a bad book. The problem it suffers is that it is a significant drop off in quality from the previous two in the trilogy. The writing style is nice a pleasant to read. There is lots of action, that is still well written. This is not a bad book. It just could have been so much more than it is though...