Ratings128
Average rating4.1
The Way of Shadows ???????????????Shadow's Edge ???????????????
Did that seriously only take me six days? It felt like an eternity.
Firstly, I finished The Way of Shadows and adored it. This whole series is a re-read for me: I originally read this series around 7-10 years ago. I tanned the whole trilogy quickly and I was far too young to properly understand and appreciate the plot. Upon re-reading, I gave the first book a five star rating and was really disappointed by this book. In fact, when speaking to my dad about the series (he had read it around the same time I originally I did), he remembered loving the first and being disappointed by the second. He told me he never bothered with the third.
The second book is so disappointing because of how much of a departure it is from the first. The first follows Kylar as he grows from young orphan boy to a master assassin. The plot is complex, the book is fast paced and the relationships are rich. I found the dynamic between Kylar and Durzo to be one of my favourite parts of the first book and I did miss it in the second. But more importantly, Kylar seems to regress from the first to the second book. In the first book he is focused and calculating, even outside of battle. For the first third of the second book he is completely adsorbed by his relationship with Elene. It makes him a completely unlikeable incel (involuntary celibate), and the majority of his thoughts about Elene complain about how they haven't had sex yet as she wants to wait for marriage.
It brings me on to another point that other reviewers have made, more eloquently than me. All of the women in this novel are piss poor caricatures of women. A whore who fell in unrequited love, a deadly assassin who uses her body for her work because she can feel no love, a prudish virgin, a woman forced to whoring and rejected by her family. It disappoints me because I enjoyed Momma K in the first book, and I was astounded at how boring and predictable Vi's plotline turned out to be in the second book.
For the first 90% of the book, the pacing is too slow and it felt like running through soup to get through the book. The last 10% flew by too fast, and held a large portion of the action. I have heard that Brent Weeks' second series shows a large improvement from this one, so my hope still remains strong. I am going to continue on and finish this trilogy to see how the bombs dropped at the end of this book detonate.