Kingdom of Ash ~ Sarah J Maas (Throne of Glass #7)
★★★☆☆
0.5 The Assassin's Blade AKA Celaena Sardothien and the Cross-Country Murder Spree
1 Throne of Glass AKA Celaena Sardothien and the Weakest Love Triangle
2 Crown of Midnight AKA Celaena Sardothien and the Most Mood-Swings
3 Heir of Fire AKA Celaena Sardothien and the Book She Remembered What Her Real Name Was
4 Queen of Shadows AKA Aelin Galathynius and the Sudden Romance With a Previously Platonic Character
5 Empire of Storms AKA Aelin Galathynius and the Horniest Road Trip Ever
6 Tower of Dawn AKA Chaol Westfall and the Book That Was Good Because Aelin Wasn't In It
7 Kingdom of Ash AKA Aelin Galathynius and the Deus Ex Army-Out-of-Nowhere Machina
(original review before I read it)
What I want to happen:
~Aelin dies and stays dead (good riddance)
~Dorian stops being a gross sexist pig, or dies
~Rowan can die too tbh
~Manon kills her grandmother, unifies the witches, and returns home
~Aedion and Lysandra stay okay, I guess, idrc about them much tbh
~Maeve dies
~Chaol is finally happy and stays happy, with Yrene
~Elide finds something to do
~Lorcan grows as a person without his blood oath to Maeve holding him down
What I think will happen:
~More gross sex scenes between Manon and Dorian
~More Rowan being obsessive
~More Chaol worrying about everyone
~More Aelin being ~the most important, most speshul girl in the whole wide world~ whose absence will prove how necessary she is, unlike Chaol in Empire of Storms
~Elide and Lorcan quickly make up and have grossly and unnecessarily descriptive sex
~More Queen Maeve being one step ahead of the court
~More obvious or groan-worthy "plot twists"
(review after I read it)
What actually happened:
~An obnoxious amount of perspectives, locations, and last minute army-out-of-nowhere saves
~The purplest prose you've ever seen. And no paragraphs longer than 3 lines unless they were dialogue. And even then...
~An overabundance of repeated exposition every time a new perspective character (all 13 of them) learned any piece of information whatsoever, even if 5 of them were in the same scene together. They must all describe how that makes them feel, even though the reader has known this info for 200 pages already! They must!!!
~Not as smutty as I was expecting, which is both a good and a bad thing. Good that I only wanted to vomit three, maybe four times. Bad that I even had to feel that way
~Dorian surprised me by not being entirely disgusting. Only a little bit horrible. But the personality that evaporated from him in Empire of Storms came back a bit and he was finally doing anything besides gnawing on Manon's mammary glands for ten pages straight
~Aelin was not as annoying as usual. Mostly because she was suffering from PTSD, but still
~All personality was stripped from Chaol and Nesryn
~Some decent enough shocks and plot twists (and one actually good one!)
~Characters that seemed to fade away into oblivion once they were no longer important to the plot
~980 pages for no reason whatsoever when it read like 400 or 500 and probably was, given the idiotic paragraph lengths
And it still utterly baffles me that there's a bad guy named Cain in the first book and a bad guy named Cairn in this one. How does a fantasy author run out of names? Aelin, Elena, Cain, Cairn. At least it's better than Isaac Hale, the worst fantasy name of all time
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