So there has been a lot of conversation around this book. Some people hating it, some people loving it. Most people falling somewhere in between.
I fear I fall “somewhere in between” loving and hating it.
I’ve followed some of the arguments about how this is Bryce’s story and while many people may have wanted to see a larger gathering of talents and minds for this war, I’m afraid that’s not where I felt the most disappointed. I fully accepted that these people did not know one another and that a crossover beyond what we saw was unlikely to occur.
The things that bothered me were not that Bryce was a turd to Azriel and Nesta, but rather that Bryce never seems to grow.
Like… ever.
The reason I loved the original Crescent City novel, and what had me picking up the second novel, was that Bryce grew an incredible amount in that first book. She underwent some horrifying things and she as a character grew from them. She is precisely the same person at the end of House of Flame and Shadow as she was at the beginning, and she really should not be.
Enter the Spoiler Zone.
I do hate giving spoilers, but the things that bother me about this book require some details, so here it goes.
#1 – At no point did I fear Bryce would lose.
Someone should have perished. Someone we cared about. They needed to LOSE somewhere in this novel, and in a big way. But even when they kind of-sort-of lost, that person was brought back from the brink of death and still played a major role in the end scenes. The book falls flat because nothing was really at stake.
#2 – The… info-dump magic video-montage.
This lasted… uh… for ages. And it gave way too much away. Sure, it was interesting at first, but I remember that every time we flashed back to Bryce in the cave listening/watching to the history that I started to groan and asked, out loud to my very confused husband; “We’re really just going to spoon feed me everything right here?”
The book would have been far more interesting if some of this magic-montage-history-lesson had been corrupted somehow. Say, maybe, at the water parasites… and instead of just having Bryce show up and mention they have a water problem, the Ocean Queen could maybe have been investigating this all along since… you know… she’s an OCEAN QUEEN and innately tied to the water.
But that’s just my gripe here. The big mysteries were explained and unveiled too early on.
#3 – Hunt got sacrificed to Bryce’s awesomeness too much.
My lord, if she mentioned Bryce doing all this amazing stuff in her pink shoes one more time I was going to lose my mind. What little Hunt was allowed to do never eclipsed or matched what Bryce did. Ever. It made him the weaker of the two, rather than her equal in the relationship, and this… This frustrated me the most. Relationships are built on give and take, and we read Romance and Romantic Fantasy to see two people come together and work out how this looks for them specifically.
Hunt was constantly on his back foot and I kept waiting for him to have a moment where he got to do some of the giving, or even have his own idea that surprises us all where he narrowly skates through danger, but he was never given this opportunity.
Now…
All that said, I gave the book 4 stars. The series is a worthwhile read for worldbuilding alone, and the Ruhn and Lidia plotline had me invested through this book. In fact, Ruhn seemed to carry the novel the most as he and Lidia had the stakes I was looking for and seemed to struggle the most to overcome the circumstances and problems surrounding them.
Happy Reading!
