It’s been a week since I finished this, and still I find it hard to form a proper opinion about it. Being torn about a book is never a good sign though.
On the one hand, I really liked the main storyline, and the POV’s of Gavin & Karris were fun to read. There’s an epic vibe going, where you can see all this exciting stuff on the horizon, but can’t place it yet, which is totally doing it for me.
On the other hand though, there’s Kip. Oh, how I dislike that kid. In my opinion, this is the area where Brent Weeks didn’t improve enough (See my The Night Angel Trilogy review). There were so many discrepencies going on. Like how he spends most of the time being a total failing wimp, only to pull some ex machina shit from his ass whenever the plot requires it. It makes absolutely no sense. The whole thing feels so fabricated that it utterly breaks the immersion. I HATED his chapters, with a passion!
The same pretty much goes for Liv as well, although that was something that gradually happened, as opposed to Kip where I carried my dislike over from The Black Prism. I didn’t like Liv choosing the side of the Color Prince. Not because he’s supposed to be the bad guy, but because it didn’t make ANY sense. She’s supposed to be all analytical and logical, because she drafts superviolet, and yet she decides that because the house has some flaws in it’s design, the whole house should be demolished and replaced by the same house, with slightly different design flaws. (ok, bad metaphor). What’s that saying? Throwing away the baby with the bath water? I really didn’t like her anymore by the end of the book. The whole thing with Zymun didn’t help either.
Apart from Kip & Liv, who take up about half the book, there’s also the whole “Classic Brent Weeks” shit going on, that I hated so much in The Night Angel Trilogy. The over-sexualizing of EVERY woman got old fast, really old, really fast.
All in all, I’m giving this a 3 star rating, because overall, I think I liked it, but I will probably not continue the series any time soon. I need to digest this and see if something sticks around my brain long enough for me to want to continue.
