The Emperor's Blades

I want to love this, wholeheartedly, without reservation, and just slam a 5 star on it and be done with it. It's awesome, in almost every way. Almost.

If only it were not for Adare.

Spoilers follow. You've been warned.

How can anyone who has supposedly studied everything and been raised in the utmost center of intrigue on the continent be so stupid and weak?

She has the treacherous bastard in her bed every night, and runs away on the very slim chance that she can gather a barely believable army instead of killing him when conditions are perfect for doing so. She then has the wished for army and a more or less undefended city (in book 2) but instead of taking it, she trusts the words of the bastards she has many reasons to believe have killed the rightful heir her brother, and marches off to do exactly what they want. Adare makes me grind my teeth until they ache. Ugh.

It's not that she does these things, it's that, the way she's written, I find it hard to believe she could be so completely idiotic. For contrast, Valyn getting disarmed by Ut near the monastery was a completely believable mistake. It was unclear what was going on, and him assuming Ut was on his side at the time made sense. But Adare is described as being educated and experienced in the life of the court, and yet every time she's presented with a problem, she walks into it like a wide-eyed, emotional child. Ugh.

Kaden & Valyn make their youthful mistakes, and somehow they're mistakes that I can swallow, but Adare always comes off looking like a hysterical and/or naive idiot. Is this a weakness in writing believable women? Is she just a Deus ex Machina character? I really don't know. But I somehow hope Brian reads these reviews and thinks about this. This trilogy is such a mass of awesomeness, with such a fatally flawed main character (of three), I only hope he gets this sort of thing right next time and totally rocks the 5 star review with his next books.

As always, crap is easy to ignore, but could've been perfect hurts. Brian, if you are reading this, you rock. Totally. I wouldn't care about Adare at all if the books were garbage, but they're so good that one of three protagonists that's an idiot is painful. Reread Adare, and get it right next time.