The Fragile Threads of Power by V.E. Schwab
I'm finally done, finally free. I started reading at the end of February but it feels like I've been stuck slogging in it forever.
It's a problem for me that I dislike or hate most of the protagonists, especially Lila Bard. They make so many bad or petty decisions. Especially Lila Bard. I'm not rooting for them. (I liked Tes and Kosika, though less so Kosika when she became All About Holland, so of course the book doesn't give us much of them. And the main protagonists treat Tes like trash.) Maybe to try to make up for this, the author has made the majority of the main antagonists loathsome, which doesn't help.
The author didn't try to get me invested in Rhy as a ruler. Yeah, he and his family don't deserve to be murdered, but I don't see why he's better as king of Red London than anyone else. The contrast of young Kosika as the queen of White London working so hard to keep her world and people alive, while Rhy... doesn't try not to get murdered doesn't help me with him.
Schwab's books tend to do a lot of flashback chapters instead of just writing the plots straightforwardly, which I'm not a huge fan of but seems to be fashionable in fiction these days, but there was a flashback sudden reveal in The Fragile Threads of Power that I felt was especially cheap: finding out that Kosika has been seeing and communicating with Holland Vosijk, the dead Someday King, her predecessor, or some facsimile of him for a very long time. Given the sway he has with her, I felt that should have come up sooner instead of being withheld to be some bum-bum-BUM moment later.
Was it supposed to be obvious that the female Hand was Ezril even before the reveal?
Note: The Fragile Threads of Power is more like book #4 of the Shades of Magic series, and if you haven't read that series you may find it hard to get into and through this book.
Although I'm really curious about how the attempt to rekindle Black London's magic will go and whether that's a decent idea or something that will get a lot of people hurt and killed and how Tes' new living situation and job go I don't think I could stand another few hundred pages of the other characters again to see them.
It's a problem for me that I dislike or hate most of the protagonists, especially Lila Bard. They make so many bad or petty decisions. Especially Lila Bard. I'm not rooting for them. (I liked Tes and Kosika, though less so Kosika when she became All About Holland, so of course the book doesn't give us much of them. And the main protagonists treat Tes like trash.) Maybe to try to make up for this, the author has made the majority of the main antagonists loathsome, which doesn't help.
The author didn't try to get me invested in Rhy as a ruler. Yeah, he and his family don't deserve to be murdered, but I don't see why he's better as king of Red London than anyone else. The contrast of young Kosika as the queen of White London working so hard to keep her world and people alive, while Rhy... doesn't try not to get murdered doesn't help me with him.
Schwab's books tend to do a lot of flashback chapters instead of just writing the plots straightforwardly, which I'm not a huge fan of but seems to be fashionable in fiction these days, but there was a flashback sudden reveal in The Fragile Threads of Power that I felt was especially cheap: finding out that Kosika has been seeing and communicating with Holland Vosijk, the dead Someday King, her predecessor, or some facsimile of him for a very long time. Given the sway he has with her, I felt that should have come up sooner instead of being withheld to be some bum-bum-BUM moment later.
Was it supposed to be obvious that the female Hand was Ezril even before the reveal?
Note: The Fragile Threads of Power is more like book #4 of the Shades of Magic series, and if you haven't read that series you may find it hard to get into and through this book.
Although I'm really curious about how the attempt to rekindle Black London's magic will go and whether that's a decent idea or something that will get a lot of people hurt and killed and how Tes' new living situation and job go I don't think I could stand another few hundred pages of the other characters again to see them.