It’s amazing, too, how seemingly perfect Antica is as a country, how it’s so prosperous and everyone is happy, even the poor people. Chaol even gets offered the same solution to bolster his spirit that Bran Stark gets after he became paralyzed from the waist down: to ride horses with special straps and stir-ups.

They’ll never know.) Then, we have that godawful cover which doesn’t match any of the other Throne of Glass books because it’s too busy looking like, yep, Game of Thrones. She added an “a” and thought, Good enough. The Baast cats are absurd, clearly stolen from Egyptian mythology without any shame and shoehorned into this fantasy world out of nowhere. Not when so much is ripped off from better sources. But reading these books means you have to suspend your disbelief about how over-the-top they are I can’t anymore. Six hours! Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? Gladiator matches would last minutes at most, especially with live blades, attack animals, and armed charioteers being thrown into the mix. The recent khagan, I was told, not shown, claimed the throne after killing his brother in a six-hour gladiator match. Not when you still have the khagan’s children fight to the death for the throne. Everything from the khagan to the warrior horsepeople was an obvious rip-off of the Dothraki from Game of Thrones, only I had to be explained to constantly how they aren’t the Dothraki because they’re civilized now and rule from a great, shining city and have 36 gods and they freed their slaves and, and, and– I couldn’t take anything about the Southern Continent seriously. Spoilers and sneering abound under the cut, so read at your own risk. There was so much filler description that my eyes constantly glazed over, and it seemed like any time characters finally stopped internal monologuing about everything to have a conversation with someone else, their dialogue would then get interrupted with paragraphs if not pages of exposition.īecause this country, Antica, and all the characters therein were never supposed to be introduced or become the focus of this series–they haven’t been this entire time–but now here we are, so we all have to play catch-up before the last book comes out, and then never return here again. Tower of Dawn is not the exception, a book that was originally supposed to be a novella but somehow became a 660-page monstrosity. Maas’ books take a sharp decline in quality whenever she’s allowed to write whatever and however much she wants. This series keeps getting worse and worse. Notable Notables: Disabled protagonist (though representation is not great) Genre: Young Adult, (actually New Adult), Fantasy, Romance

Tower of dawn series