Tag: Magic

This book really helped with the Crescent City hangover I was going through. I can’t believe I held out for so long when it came to this series as it was honestly becoming a hassle trying to avoid spoilers online. But it fit in with this month’s theme, fantasy, and now I can peruse the internet without fear or anxiety of having the plot ruined! I say that because I immediately started on the sequel hours after finishing Fourth Wing, because it ends on a really heartwarming cliffhanger and I had to know what happened. But you will have to wait until Thursday next week for that review, I am not that quick when it comes to writing my thoughts down.

Fourth Wing takes place in a fantasy world of two kingdoms in which dragons and gryphons exist, along with magic. The territories of Navarre and Poromiel have been at war for four hundred years and it seems like there will never be an end to it. Even the trade agreement put into place two hundred years ago, in which goods are exchanged four times a year, doesn’t stop the two kingdoms from constantly fighting with each other. We follow our main character, Violet, a girl born with a weak body due to an illness her mother had while she was pregnant. She had been training her entire life to work in the library as a scribe due to her physical limitations, but after the death of her scribe father, her General mother forces her to join the riders quadrant to become a warrior. Either the General has a lot of pride or she just doesn’t even like her daughter at all, because she has to know that Violet’s chances of surviving the brutal training that comes with being a cadet of the riders quadrant are slim. 

That’s the plot without giving too much away. Still, I do want to talk about some of the characters. Dain, Violet’s friend since childhood, seems nice at first in his desire to keep her alive and safe, but he soon starts to rub me the wrong way with his hovering, overprotectiveness, and lack of faith in her. He constantly tells her what she isn’t and what she cannot do, and I know I would have lost my patience with him long before she did. Contrary to Dain, Mira, Violet’s older sister, goes about trying to protect her in the correct way, by giving her as many tips as she can in the short period of time she has with her before she enters the quadrant. Mira knows that Violet was better suited to be a scribe, not just because of her physical limitations, but because of her brilliant mind. This doesn’t stop her from being the good kind of protective, by providing Violet with an armored corset that she tells her to wear at all times, and a book from their older brother, which they are not supposed to have but is full of valuable information for survival. There are a lot of other characters in the book, but I warn you, try get too attached to anyone, as there is a lot of death.

I also wanted to talk a little bit about my favorite theme that is an essential part of the story, and that is sexuality. Because the riders quadrant is the most dangerous, a place where you can literally die any day, the cadets live as though every day could be their last. That translates to a lot of sex. Violet, being weak, has to be on guard at all times, so she refrains from getting physical with anyone because being killed before, during, or after sex is a possibility. This leaves her feeling lonely and frustrated, and sometimes the butt of jokes with her few friends. Finding someone to trust enough to have a physical relationship also poses a problem for Violet, as relationships are discouraged. The training in the riders quadrant is so rigorous, and the competition between cadets is so great, that death from training or assassination is something that occurs nearly every day. No one wants to date someone only to see them die during a training exercise or watch them get stabbed by a fellow cadet, so everyone tries to leave emotions out of their physical encounters and this leaves Violet without any options. Besides all that drama, I do love the representation of heterosexual and homosexual characters. 

I am excited to see where this story goes. I imagine that there will be one or two additional books in the future. And as long as the second book is as good as the first I think this is a series I will anticipate in seeing the conclusion of the tale.

I am going to start off yet again stating that this post is full of spoilers, much more so than my last post. I would suggest that unless you have finished HOFAS or you just don’t care about spoilers, do not read any further than this paragraph. 

I was very pleasantly surprised. This book does a really good job of cleaning up a lot of loose ends. It doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, but I was left with a few questions, nothing that will keep me up at night, but it gives me hope that there will be a fourth book in the future. And seeing that each of the books have been titled after three of the four houses, I think it would be safe to assume that the fourth book would potentially be titled House of Many Waters. I don’t want to get into the plot, because it is a lot, but every major cliffhanger we were left with at the end of HOSAB is resolved. We also got the crossover we were waiting for, and I really liked that we not only got to see some of the ACOTAR characters in the very beginning of the book but at the end too. A lot of the evil, cruel, and misogynistic characters are killed and there is a happy ending for almost all of the protagonists. In this book, there is a lot of back and forth with the first person point of view which goes constantly back and forth between Bryce, Hunt, Ruhn, Tharion, Ithan, and Lidia. I feel like there might even have been a few other first person point of views that I am missing, I think Hypaxia might be one of them. I was hearing that a lot of people didn’t like that the point of view changed so often but I did not mind it. All the main characters were split up for a lot of the book. The way the story flows makes it so that the reader is seeing things as they happen in the present time, so even though Bryce is in Prythian, Hunt is in the dungeons with Ruhn and Baxian, and Declan and Flynn are doing reconnaissance, sometimes with Ithan and Tharion, you get to see what everyone is doing at the same time on the same day. I feel like this worked well, even if you were dying to know what happened to someone but you had to read from the point of view of a few characters before you got back to the story line you were most interested in.

That is about as much as I will say about the plot overall. Now, I just want to get my questions out there.

Is Sathia in some kind of trouble? She went to the Meat Market to try and see if she could free her friend from the Viper Queen. And Tharion, on his way there to find her, is confronted by Ariadne, who was kind of working for the Viper Queen as a fighter, but left her service towards the end of the book. Speaking of which, is she even still a slave?

Who killed the seventh Asteri, Octartis? Sirius was killed, or removed from the world, a long time ago by one of the Princes of Hel. Bryce killed Polaris on the battlefield by using the blades and her power to open the portal to nowhere. Immediately after that she and Hunt teleported to the first light tubes where they were met with Rigelus, soon after joined by Eosphoros, Hesperus, and Austrus. Bryce sends them into a second portal. Both Ruhn and Bryce mention that they felt time slow down in between the death of Polaris and the other four Asteri, which is an indicator that an Asteri had been killed. Did I miss something? I swear no one talks about it in the aftermath. I also couldn’t find an answer online. 

The tattoo on Bryce’s back is in the same language as the symbols used in the Book of Breathings, as stated by Amren in the beginning of the book. Are these the same symbols that Ithan sees on the metal bowl that the statue is holding when he and Hypaxia go to see the Under King in the Bone Quarter? He says the symbols look familiar but he can’t place them. If he has seen Bryce’s tattoo, maybe that is why they seem familiar. Or, it could be that Ithan was a history major and maybe he saw something similar in a book while he was in school. And following that, are the symbols Wyrd marks? As in the symbols that are prevalent in the Throne of Glass series? 

Finally, why did that one language, the old Fae language, stop being spoken in Prythian over 15,000 years ago? Did it just fall out of style? I feel like it might have something to do with the Asteri. Maybe they didn’t want the Fae of Prythian and the Fae of Midgard to be able to communicate with each if they ever came into contact. Maybe it was like their kill switch, an insurance policy created on the very slim chance that the portal between worlds would open and the two groups could somehow figure out that the Dagdan and the Asteri were the same beings. 

I know that I probably won’t get answers to these questions for a long time, but I can wait patiently. I believe that the next book SJM is writing is another installment in the ACOTAR series and that is probably a few years away from being published. And while I think that there will be mentions of what happened in HOFAS in the next installment of ACOTAR, I think it will primarily focus on the characters in that universe. I personally am hoping for an Azriel focused story, he is my favorite, and I am really hoping that he ends up with Gwyn, or, in a surprise twist, Eris.

With HOFAS due to arrive at my house on February 2nd I did it again and read another book consisting of over 700 pages in less than 48 hours. I could not put House of Sky and Breath down, and it wasn’t because I was in a rush to read the newly released third book of the series. We finally got answers to the many questions that we were left with at the end of HOEAB. On top of that, new mysteries were placed before us in this second Crescent City novel, and I found myself surprised more than once with things I wasn’t even considering and did not see coming. I was happy that there wasn’t an overload of new information right at the start which seemed to overwhelm me and the majority of everyone else who has read the first book. However, we were given just as much new information to mull over and try to sort through. I did have to add to my pages of notes that I took during the first book because I knew that there was no way I was going to remember everything. I also knew that even the smallest thing could come up big in the future. Even though I know I will be re-reading these books at some point in the future, the notes are good to have on hand.

I will preface this next paragraph by saying there are minor spoilers ahead, but if you are here reading this it is likely that you have already finished reading HOEAB and hopefully HOSAB. I am not going to give an overview of the book, it would be impossible, I am just going to express some of my overall feelings. You may now continue if you wish, you have been warned. 

At the end of HOEAB Bryce and Hunt were in her apartment trying to wind down after saving the city from Hel’s demons. Before they could seal the deal, they were both interrupted by phone calls, Bryce getting one from her mother and Hunt getting one from Isaiah. They both end up going to help sort out all the chaos that occurs after the battle which also included the deaths of two very important leaders. We find out in HOSAB that afterwards, instead of going home and finishing what they started, Bryce told Hunt that she wanted to take things slow, and get to know each other better. Several months have passed and they have been working on their friendship, and in terms of their physical relationship it seems like at most they have been holding hands and doing cheek and forehead kisses. Then we learn that she suggested a date to consummate their relationship, and that it is still months away. I was so disappointed when I read this, I believe I actually let out a drawn out, “What?” in frustration. I tried to make peace with myself after coming to realize that it was going to be a long time before any action happened. Luckily, my hope of Bryce changing the terms came true and we ended up not having to wait too long for something to happen, if you count a quarter of the entire book as not being too long. But the wait is worth it, because this book gets spicy. For two people that were incredibly attracted to each other, they have an amazing amount of self control. I feel like the wait we had to go through as readers was as frustrating as it was for these imaginary characters in their situation. 

Obviously, there is way more to this book than just the spice. We get to learn more about Hunt’s friend, Tharion, the mer man. He actually has kind of a tragic backstory and you end up feeling really bad for the guy. Ithan gets a bigger role in this story, which I ended up loving. He’s a really selfless, kind guy, he just believed in the lies that were spread because no one was able to present him with the truth until recently, and I am glad he and Bryce were able to mend their friendship. The story ends really tragically though, with some of the characters being captured and the core gang getting split up. But it is the last chapter in the book, the chapter with the biggest and most exciting cliffhanger I have ever read, that is probably the greatest thing to ever happen in fantasy novel history. I was more excited about getting to read HOFAS than I was when I got to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows after that two year wait. I will just say that it has something to do with my favorite SJM series. After finishing this book, I think that this is now my second favorite series in the SJM universe. And I think after I have finished the next book in a few days I will be solid with my resolve in this decision.

I went into this book knowing very little, the basics basically. The biggest pieces I knew were that the main character was a woman named Bryce, there were a lot of mythical creatures and hybrids, and that the author was inspired to write it after watching Zootopia with her kids. I honestly wish I had never heard that last part because I kept thinking about Zootopia and the similarities between the film and this book as I was reading. Knowing that bit of background information didn’t diminish how much I enjoyed the story overall, it just distracted me a lot. 

As for the story itself, I didn’t like it immediately, and not just because it was kind of hard to follow in the beginning. Something about it just wasn’t drawing me in at first, but having finished it I can say that I would read it again, and I will read it again. People were not joking when they said that no one has any idea what is going on for the first fifty pages, and if they say they did then they were lying. I myself took about three standard notebook sized pages of notes while I was reading, two of them I filled up during those first fifty pages. I think that the overwhelming pile of information you get at the very beginning may cause some people to want to give up reading it altogether. But be strong! Once you get past all that and the story begins to unfurl, you will not want to stop reading. I think I may have hit a personal record when I finished this 799 page book in less than 48 hours. Essentially, I only stopped to eat, sleep, shower, take care of my cat, and assure a few people that I was alive and ok. It is rare that I find a book that makes me want to put everything else in my life on hold because I need to finish the story. I think my favorite thing overall was that even though the story had merpeople, fae, angels, and a bunch of other creatures, they existed in a world that also had modern technology. I have been longing for a story like this for a long time. 

I was coming up with predictions as I went, but a lot of them ended up being wrong. I placed a lot of post its to mark things I thought were important to go back to. There was one specific phrase that is uttered many times in the ACOTAR series that was said a few times in this book. And even though I went into this book almost blind, I do go on the internet, and though I tried extremely hard to avoid spoilers, I wasn’t able to dodge all of them. I think the characters of Prythian might end up meeting some of the characters of Valbara. I think this phrase was giving us readers a hint. I am not joking when I say that as soon as I finish writing this review I am opening up the next book. My plan was to give myself a week to read each of the two preceding books in the hope that I would be ready to go once I got my copy of HOFAS. I really underestimated myself. I think I am going to end up going to a midnight party to try and get a copy of the book the very second it goes on sale, because I know I am going to finish the next book just as quickly as the first one.