Spoilery Book Reviews

Kingdom of Ash by Sarah J Maas

Back of the book

The final battle is here.

Aelin Galanthynius has risked everything to save her people – but at a tremendous cost. Locked in an iron coffin by the Queen of the Fae, Aelin must use all her fiery will to endure the torture inflicted upon her. If she yields to Maeve she will doom everyone she loves, but her resolve is beginning to unravel...

With Aelin imprisoned, her friends must go on without her. Some bonds will deepen, while other will be severed forever. But as destinies weave together at last, all must unite as Aelin fights to save herself – and the promise of a better world.

My thoughts

Oh boy this is one long book. Although I certainly read it much faster than Tower of Dawn. I think part of me just wanted to escape this series so I can read something different.

The first half is good and engaging. I've said this before, I love some good suffering and Aelins' capture is beautiful in that way. Despite my penchant for suffering, I came to really dislike all the war scenes. They drag on and on and become more and more hopeless. This depressing vibe contrasts with how few main character deaths there are. Maas kills off the Thirteen for the sheer body count, and Gavriel, so that there are no single survivors. Sarah J Maas has not mastered the art of killing characters well. Nehemia was killed too early to deeply impact the reader and Sorscha's "plotline" was terrible in its entirety.

Another criticism to Maas: Pairing people up. pLease stop. Lysandra and Aedion got so much worse in this book. It was so icky for me. Their arguments, near death bringing them together, madly making out when not slaughtering, didn't sit right with me. I don't like that pairing. I liked Elide and Lorcan but I didn't like them being brought together by a near death experience. Lorcan should have had to grovel on his knees for forgiveness and actually sort out their issues and differences, not just nearly die then forgive each other endlessly. Such a cop out.

I really wanted Aelin to succeed with the wyrdkeys and have it all be over in a bug hurrah. Probably because I hated all the war scenes but also finding the wyrdkeys had been the entire plot of this series and they fizzled out to NOT save the day. I liked that Yrene saved the day, but the ending still didn't sit quite right with me. I feel these books hyped themselves up too much, built the precipices too high and had a dull ending.

This book series starts out with a kickass character going on a literal adventure and suffering a bit. Then Maas tries to inject some romance and erotica, which sometimes works well and other times clashes heavily with the context. The last book is just war which I didn't love. The series feels like it changes genre and the last two books lose some elements that made the first few books good. Also deeper into the series it becomes apparent that for each trope, Maas felt the need to have no less than two (usually more) characters fall into that trope within one book series. (Let alone among her other series.)

TL:DR

Read one SJM series, you've read them all (repetitive tropes, Fae setting always, kickass women that still manage to get into relationships with red flags)