24.08.26
Holly Black is a good writer but this was a bit of a mess. The incidental worldbuilding was refreshing - the details (oh, so it's the '90s, oh, so these are the features of faeries) meant there wasn't the usual tedious exposition. But that also made it confusing to work out what was going on - was there even a central plot driving towards a specific goal or really any reason for the characters doing what they were doing?
17.07.24
And the last of my holiday reads was also the last in this intriguing trilogy. For a romantasy author, Black doesn't shy away from politics and power and the ways they can be manipulated by those who have power and those who don't (yet). And her main character is, interestingly, both skilled in scheming and clueless in relationships. But it was still a bit 'chuck everything at it and see what sticks', and there were a few elements about the ending that didn't quite work.
06.07.24
That difficult second book in a trilogy, the bridge between the intriguing opening and explosive ending. This particular bridge wasn't particularly well designed - functional but more of a route to somewhere else than a journey in itself.
I thought it was about time I read something by the prolific Holly Black and this turned out to be pretty awesome, in all senses: vividly written with fabulous worldbuilding and a complex, intriguing protagonist. It did have confusingly strange pacing, on both a general and line level, and abruptly changed tone when it went all Game of Thrones about two-thirds in, but I was quite happy to be swept along in the court intrigue.
07.06.21
Perhaps the barely literate style choice of omitting conjunctions and pronouns at the start of run-on sentences was to distract attention from the incoherent story and forgettable characters. So it was no surprise that it ended as if some pages were missing.
