Kings of Ash

I did not enjoy reading this book, the last 50-70 pages actively angered me, and I'm glad the book is over. But I can't give it less than three stars, because Ruka is one of the most complex, fascinating, and well written characters I've ever read about. Ruka is endlessly compelling, every single scene with him is interesting. And since he's like 80% of the book, that's a very good thing. Nell has his hands on a top tier character here.

Unfortunately, nothing much else worked for me in this one. I loved Kings of Paradise, and I was super excited for this one. I knew going into it that it would involve mostly flashbacks but as we got further into the flashbacks, my disdain for the overall structure of this series started. I simply don't think this is the way I want to read this story. Book two's flashbacks should have been in book one, and this series should have been told (atleast relatively) linearly. As it stands, the end of Kings of Paradise jumps forward in time in order to end on a huge cliffhanger, and then Kings of Ash jumps much further back in time in order to give that cliffhanger context, and then the ending of this book picks up on the cliffhanger in a way in which I felt was ridiculous and convoluted. Kings of Ash takes the miscommunication trope to new lengths I've never witnessed, to shocking levels of “people just need to open their mouths and use their words and there would be no problems”.

The storyline in this book with Kale I didn't enjoy; his character is very different from where we left him and we don't get enough time with him to emphasize with his internal struggles. There was a section of the book where we hadn't seen Kale for hundreds of pages and when he showed up again I had genuinely forgotten what he was doing the last time we saw him.

Also the amount of ‘quotations' around ‘words' that don't ‘need' quotations in this ‘book' was insane. They were just used factually incorrect. If I was to say there are 100 incorrect usages of ‘quotations' in this book, I do not think it would be an exaggeration.

For more positives, some of the side characters in this series are great. They keep me guessing with their motivations, and I enjoy reading about them. Nell writes great, compelling action sequences as well, and this series scaled from low magic to high magic in an awesome way that I want to know more about.

I'm willing to write this book off as middle book syndrome with some shoddy miscommunication tropes and continue on with book three, but I definitely need a break instead of heading straight into it like I planned. I have to finish it though, for Ruka.