alison

I'm writing this review after re and rereading this book multiple times. At first, I loved this book. The plot, the characters, I adored all of it. Until I started picking out a few critiques. Don't get me wrong, I still do like this series. But there's a few things that still get me. 1. The love triangle. The books rely so heavily on the love triangle that it makes other very important plot twists I won't reveal to avoid spoiling, small and no one pays attention to them. 2. The love triangle. But for a different reason. The whole Team Keefe vs Team Fitz has gotten so ridiculous it's even transpired into a whole debate over what Sophie's pet color should be in the next book on social media. How does one use ships to ruin that? This isn't the author's fault, of course, but it really is getting ridiculous. Not only that, but when a person passionately ships one ship but has to have people constantly attacking them over it.. not fun. Not only countering ships, but straight-out ripping apart characters, people, just because of the ship war. It's ruining a perfectly good book, and some shippers simply refuse to listen to reason from what I've seen. Even violence is included sometimes. 3. Deaths. There's no... heavily changing deaths. Even when one of the side-main-ish character died, they were somehow brought back again. Again, not going to go into detail. There are about 8 important main-group characters in total. That's actually quite a lot of main characters; especially in battle. I find it not very realistic that almost each and every one of these 8 people manage to make it out of battle. It's main character shielding. Of course, if one character dies, it's devastating; but it adds so much more dynamic. I'm not talking about character death lightly; but I'm saying that I would have liked it better if the main characters weren't all shielded, because again, especially in dangerous battles it's just not realistic that each of them all manage to survive for 8.5 books straight. For example, Harry Potter. The main trio survived, yes, but other dependent characters died; ones that really, really made a strong impact. It's different from KOTLC in that sense. Of course they're totally different books and really can't be compared, but in the death sense-- 4. Characters come and go. Dex, for example. After the first book he's hardly mentioned until the love square is somewhat solved. And then back to being forgotten. Then take Marella. She wasn't mentioned at all until the main crew needed her; and until she manifested. Even then, she still wasn't mentioned often; mostly for extra content. I get that she drifted apart from the crew, but it was almost like she was the main character in the book until she was thrown away for new characters. It's the author's choice, of course, whether or not to keep or let characters go. But especially Dex, plays an important role in the books and I believe deserve more page time. 5. Repeated writing. Keefe runs away repeatedly. And if this ends with Keefe never coming back or such, ( As of the current book ), that may be better. But if Keefe is to go, come back, go, being brought back, etc,etc, that, from what I've seen, would be sloppy writing. I have very strong opinions on each of the characters as well, but that's not a book review so I'm not going to go into that. I'm giving this book a 4/5. Overall, I enjoyed it and most likely will continue to, and I remember the joy I first felt when I read it. However after continuous re-reading, I've found these pointers and would really like it if some changes were made.