I just can't read those books. They're so...wrong. No basis in reality, which shouldn't matter when one reads fantasy and scifi. But I just can't suspend my disbelief on something that tries so hard to be close to reality like that series.

Honourable mention has to go to the Honor Harrington series by David Weber. Not everyone's cup of tea though.

 

Honor Harrington is pretty good for the first 8 books or so, but after awhile the whole thing feels a bit... masturbatory?

I was really wishing Haven would get a few wins towards the end there. Not out of political bias - though it can get a bit space libertarian anvillicious at times - but just because it was a bit boring to read the Star Kingdom of Manticore triumphing again and again and again.

 

Yeah, it's one of my favourite series to read but the later books can be rather annoying. Still some gems in there, but they meander a bit. And spend too much time seeming to make the enemy into friends. Granted, David Weber is good at making a sympathetic enemy.

 

13thadaption Palindrome You ladies wanted to read this, so I'm letting you know. Can't say how much you'll enjoy it, it's just 3k words of rambling, but I dare say there's more substance in this rant than the book.

So. Throne of Glass, by Sarah J. Maas. I recommend that you don't read it. Here's my review - well, more of a collection of remarks I want to make regarding this incredibly disappointing book. Spoilered because I will spoil heavily.

Spoiler

You might ask: why did I even buy this book in the first place? Well, I saw it on a shelf in a bookstore and the first impression I got from a glance at the cover and the blurb was a good hook: the front cover depicts the heroine in a pretty badass pose and she has this look of "Get the fuck out of my way or I will end you." The blurb speaks of an assassin who participates in a tournament for the position of the King's Assassin, but not everyone plays by the official rules and participants start getting murdered. So, high fantasy Hunger Games mixed with GoT character death and the MC is an assassin? Yes, please.

How deceived I was.

The first batch of red flags are hoisted up on the first few pages: the deadliest assassin in the land is a beautiful eighteen year old girl who can kill any opponent in five seconds, a claim she makes often and smugly. Basically Twilight vibes, if Edward was the MC. Wait, isn't there a version of Twilight from his POV? Nevermind...

Right off I'm introduced to a character who is just soooo clever because when some soldier douche tries to confuse her by taking the same stairs twice, she of course notices and begins planning her escape, because of course.

The title mentions a Throne of Glass. I didn't see any glass throne in the book, though I did get a glass castle. Yeah, a castle made of glass. My first thought was, "that's dumb". My second thought was, "well, if she goes with it, it might just turn out awesome". She didn't. By 'she' I mean the author. The castle has a typical stone section and from what I understood, the part that's made of glass is only glass on the exterior, like the glass is decoration or something and there's still a sturdier structure inside the glass? Think what you will, but to me that sounds like the author realised the idea is kind of silly and didn't have the stomach to take it further into the fantasy realm so as to make it work within her world, so she stopped halfway through and settled for a kind of cop out. The castle got a whole paragraph to itself because it's where the book happens.

That's not to say there's nothing at all interesting about the location. In fact, there are some nice things, but nothing I haven't seen before. Big library, okay. Dark, foreboding clock tower guarded by gargoyles and inscribed with Wyrdmarks (local magic runes). All right, I'll take it. Dungeons and hidden passages? Now you're not even trying.

So, right off the bat, the setting isn't a very strong point. It's not bad, mind you, but nothing to roll up my socks, so other elements will have to pick up the slack here. That said, let's move on to what I anticipate will be the largest section. Characters. I'll leave the MC for last, because she's the juiciest piece of meat here.

Supporting characters are all flat, uninteresting bundles of well-worn tropes. Let's see. The King of Adarlan (local murderous expansionist empire) is just an asshole and only gains a little depth at the very end of the book in a minor reveal about another secondary character. This another character is a one-dimensional cold, calculating noble lady who wants the Prince, but of course the Prince is busy flirting with the MC, so she plots to have the MC killed or whatever. Just your basic cold-hearted bitch, with one of the silliest, stupidest names I've seen in fantasy: Lady Kaltain Rompier. Yes, her name is Kaltain. Rompier. headdesk

There's an asshole secondary Prince (not Prince Charming, some other douche who's in cahoots with the asshole King). This guy's name is Perrington and his character and actions throughout the book are just as uninspired as his name. Close to the end he poisons the MC or whatever and then blames Kaltain fucking Rompier. MC gets saved from poison by magic - whatever - so no worries. Yawn.

There's a Princess from a far away land whose country just got conquered by the Asshole King and she's at the Asshole Court as a hostage not-in-name, you know the deal: we'll keep you here as insurance that your country plays nice. She's also doing some spy work on the side for her people, she supports the Generic Resistance and pretends not to know the local language very well. She becomes friends with the MC and knows magic, she's the one who saves the MC from poison at the end. It's all as boring as it sounds, really. There's a bunch of other minor characters, but let's get to the four most important ones. The MC, Prince Charming, the Captain of the Guard and the Antagonist.

The Antagonist is about the blandest generic bad guy ever: he's a mountain of muscle who always takes the piss out of the MC, just an all-around douchebag, he's the best fighter, best climber, best jogger and so on. The deal with this guy is that there are 24 contestants in the King's Tournament and the Antagonist (his name is Cain, real creative there) starts murdering them by summoning a freaky monster who makes a bloody mess of those it kills, which in turn grants Cain their strength. It was so painfully obvious that he was going to be the Big Bad that when the author tried a poor twist by blaming the MC's Princess friend, I just sighed, because I'd been rolling my eyes a lot prior to this point and I wanted to switch it up.

Captain of the Guard is named Chaol and he's the gruff soldier type, super competent Captain (according to the author) who throughout the course of the book (like half of the 24 competitors get murdered by Cain's freaky monster) makes exactly zero progress in the investigation of those murders. He's also never seen someone die. Not just never killled. He's never seen someone die. This is the Captain of the Royal Guards, who serves a King who's been doing nothing but slaughtering those he conquered for at least a decade and the Captain is basically a pussy. He tries to resist the MC's charms at the beginning, but it's obvious that he's going to fall for her, because we must have a Love Triangle with Prince Charming (will they? won't they?). He loses his Murder Virginity at the end of the book in just about the least exciting way possible. Whatever. Fuck this bland guy who the author wants me to think is gruff, but really he probably just doesn't shave. Oh yeah, he's also twenty-two years old. This little detail will be important later.

Prince Charming exists in this book for a single purpose - to be the love interest. He literally has nothing else to do and he gets a fair few POV scenes in a 500 page book. If he thinks about anything else, it all ties back to the MC - he doesn't want to get married because he wants to make his own choice (the MC). He breeds dogs because the author wanted to give the MC a puppy. He plays pool because the author wanted him to flirt with the MC by showing her how to hold the cue stick. He's so handsome (aww), puts Adonis to shame, and he used to be a great fencer years ago, but the comfortable lifestyle at the court made him a bit flabby. Guess how old he is. He's nineteen. He's literally Prince Charming, that's how fucking disgustingly charming he is, in the author's opinion.

And finally - finally! - we arrive at the heart of this book's problems. The MC. Let's start with her name. Most characters (except Kaltain Rompier, whose name is just fucking ridiculous) have pretty generic fantasy names. The bad guy is Cain, the Captain is Chaol Westfall, Prince Charming is Dorian Havilliard (couldn't help picturing Ben Barnes in a blond wig, and I'm so sorry if you understood this reference without having to google). The MC is Celaena Sardothien. What even is that? Selene? Celene? Se-lay-na? Kay-lee-na? You know, Special Snowflake Name.

Celaena is eighteen at the beginning of the book. We meet her after Dorian pulls her out of a dreadful work camp to be his champion in the King's Tournament. Celaena, before she was captured (at age seventeen) had already become the most feared assassin in the known world, trained by the King of Assassins.

Let me repeat that. She's the Most Feared Assassin in the Land. She's eighteen.

I could've bought The Most Feared Assassin in A Single District of The Capital City of Rifthold, but this is pushing the limits of Special Snowflakiness. The author is pushing so fucking hard for the teen YA protag angle it's stupid. Making the MC so young made sense when the author herself was 16 when she first wrote the book, but the book was published when the author was 22. Making Celaena 18 also opens the door to having her be a bratty little shit who fawns over dresses. So many problems with this book could have been fixed automatically if the main trio of characters: Celaena, Chaol and Dorian were all ten years older. But noooo.

Okay, we have our (enact your strongest Suspension of Disbelief buff) eighteen year old Feared Assassin who becomes the Prince's champion in the tournament to fight for the title of King's Assassin for a promise of freedom after four years of service - of course, she has to win the competition first, but that seems to be a mere formality, because one of the things Celaena likes to do is estimating how many seconds it would take her to kill a particular person.

She once tried to escape from the horrible work camp (that the author wants me to believe is the local Auschwitz) and killed 23 guards in the attempt, but was ultimately unsuccessful. So I'm told that this eighteen year old bratty girl mowed down 23 guards with a fucking pickaxe (the work camp is a salt mine). She's Badass, you see. That's important.

Celaena, Chaol and Dorian go to the capital city of Rifthold for the Tournament. Celaena gets a suite of sweet fuckin' rooms, a personal maid, a bunch of beautiful dresses and the Prince is already falling in love with her. Keep in mind that she's an assassin and Captain Chaol acts like she's prone to going on a murderous rampage armed with a toothpick at any moment. By the way, her apartment has a pool table and a full rack of cue sticks. Way to keep the dangerous assassin away from improvised weapons, Captain Shithead, keep on sucking at your job.

You know what, if I went into excruciating detail here it would take way too long, so I'll shorten it. TLDR is that I'm repeatedly told how deadly Celaena is, but I'm never shown. This deadly assassin doesn't assassinate a single person through the course of the book. Even after her opponents start getting murdered. I was waiting for her to realize that hey, this is a great way to get rid of competition, but no. She doesn't kill anyone. She kills Cain's freaky monster, but that fight - the Grand Reveal of the Bad Guy's Scheme! - is so unexciting that it's not even the climax of the book. Cain's Evil Plan is basically a subplot.

Celaena spends her days fawning over dresses and noticing how fucking stunning she looks in them (oh my fabulous hair!), fawning over Dorian, being just so sarcastic and witty, reading books (because she loves books, the assassin has a love of fine literature, you fuckin' know it), playing piano (because you know the teenage emo assassin plays the piano) and getting sneaked up on by Dorian and other people (once when she's playing the piano). Oh, she also imagines a lot how it would take her like five seconds and three moves to kill Cain who's such a dick, but she never sneaks out of her apartments at night to try and kill him.

One of her opponents in the competition is a poisons expert. When she discovers a bag of candy on her bed (no note, no nothing), she does the sensible thing and gorges herself silly on the stuff.

No one is supposed to know who she really is, so the gang (Dorian and Chaol, the King also knows) tell everyone that Celaena is really Lady Lillian, a nobleman's daughter who also happens to be a jewel thief. The moment I read what her cover story was, I yelled at the book for how stupid the author was. She fawns over dresses, plays piano, likes sweets, likes reading, fawns over the Prince and is bratty and spoiled? Wow, this hardened Moste Fearde Assassine totally sounds like a nobly born jewel thief, doesn't she? I've never seen an author shoot themselves in the foot repeatedly like this. The book would have been much better if Celaena wasn't an assassin capable of killing a man in five seconds, but instead a thief who found herself competing against murderers and sorely out of depth in the combat department. But, of course, Celaena has been trained in the use of every kind of blade by the Assassin King, not to worry.

Celaena is possibly the most unsympathetic MC I've ever read about. From the first pages I wanted her to die. She talks all the fucking time how badass she is, how she wants freedom. When she discovers a secret tunnel leading to a way out (there are even rowboats there, ready for escaping!), she speculates that gathering enough food for the escape could take months. Bitch, just row to the shore, murderize and steal everything you need and leave the fucking country!

She's spoiled and is being spoiled by Chaol and Dorian (remember, she's supposed to be a dangerous assassin) by getting all the dresses and shit, is needlessly antagonistic, displays zero qualities I would expect from an elite assassin in a medieval fantasy book, and has no sense of subtlety or anything, really. She knows how to run her mouth and that's about it, and she's not even funny when she does that last thing. The few times I see her being competent I don't think "fuck yeah, here's the Assassin", I think "blergh, more of that Mary Sue shit". Because make no mistake. She's the most blatant Mary Sue ever and everyone who deflects with claims that she's a Strong, Independent Woman needs to shut the fuck up and go read Mistborn or something. Side note, if you thought the romance in Mistborn was shoehorned in and pathetic, then I assure you, there's always another bottom in this barrel.

Now we come to the Plot and Conflict. The Plot is the Tournament. 24 competitors, among them deserters, thieves, assassins, serial killers. Half of them get murdered by Cain's freaky monster (btw, the atmosphere in the castle doesn't change at all, lady Kaltain Rompier is only preoccupied with getting the Prince, never with the incredibly brutal murderer in the castle - and it's just grotesquely brutal, I'm talking missing internal organs, bodies half-eaten, blood smeared all over the place, skin torn from the face – Saw-level pointless gore that's supposed to make me believe that the Stakes Are Real). Halfway through the book magic comes into play and Celaena finds out that Cain is summoning his freaky monster. But you know what, for the first half of the book I'm made to think that the biggest part of the Tournament will be the Trials taking place every week. Sure, I see a few of them - they climb a building, they run a marathon, like, really riveting stuff - but then there'll be a paragraph like "They had done two more Trials and Celaena got through both easily". The author skips the Trials in favor of Celaena reading in the library, prancing around in her pretty dresses, arguing with the Captain and fantasizing about wanting to kiss the Prince.

The entire book is a collection of tired tropes put together in the most unimaginative of ways, and suffers from what has to be the most egregious case of telling not showing in the history of published fiction. The author takes every opportunity to make her heroine more vapid and boring and irritating. According to the author, the story came from the idea "What if Cinderella was an assassin instead of a servant? What if she went to the ball to do something horrible, like kill the Prince instead of marry him?" That's fine, except she forgot to make Cinderella an actual assassin. Celaena Sardothien is about as lethal as the average teenaged girl and I'm pretty sure even I, overweight and not trained in martial arts as I am, could put most teenage girls in the fucking ground because all I would have to do is sit on them.

I can't speak to the quality of prose because I read the Polish version, and as I'm learning in my college classes, translation is tricky business. The one thing I can point to is how Celaena is constantly referred to as "the assassin" when she really isn't one.

I cannot fathom how this book got publish- wait, actually, I totally can. It's just the next in line of Twilight, Hunger Games, Divergent emo teen girl power fantasy fiction that you know will sell no matter how shit it is. So yeah, I totally see why this book was published and why there are four sequels out already, with the fifth one upcoming. Nothing to see here, move along.

 

Sorrows: https://forums.darklordpotter.net/showthread.php?t=30748

Knock yourself out!

 

Oh please do! I love reading angry rant reviews, especially where you can tell that by the end the reader only pushed themselves through the rest of the book just so their angry rant could be one hundred percent accurate.

Because you recommended it, I read that just now. Not bad! It's very YA and a bit silly in places, but the main character is definitely well done - I especially liked her approach to her love interest, where all the mentions of it are done rather offhandedly with a nice bit of genre self-awareness ("I hate love triangles.")

The best part of the book was the discovery of her powers and exploration of what she could do. From there on it wasn't as polished, but a fun read in general. It occasionally gave me vibes of those fanfics where Harry spends way too long picking out a dimensional trunk in Diagon Alley. Pick it up if you like the premise and don't mind reading YA stuff - the main characters were definitely the strong suit.

 

I really liked Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain. There's a manic energy to the book that just makes it really fun to read, despite being very YA and no great work of literature even within than genre.

There's two sequels out and a spin-off. The sequels are good but not as good as the original. Book 2 (Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up The Moon) lacks some of the manic energy of the first. Book 3 (Please Don't Tell My Parents I've Got Henchmen) again lacks the manic energy and is a bit aimless besides. I still enjoyed them but the first is by far the best. I'm reading the spin-off at the moment, so no comment on that yet.

 

Far outside my usual wheelhouse, but possibly an ambitious and thoughtful enough idea to make me go there.

Military scifi is almost legendary for it's conservative ideology, it's almost harder to find exceptions than examples. Goes with assuming the thrust to explore space will be a primarily national/military endeavor I suppose, though corporate backed exploration is a mire of its own.

http://hradzka.livejournal.com/194753.htmlThis post, of "John Ringo No!" fame has some interesting things to say about ideological bias. He actually wrote a series with Weber at one point, which to this day I register as really questionable but somehow entertaining despite (because?) all its issues.

It feels sacrilegious to admit, but while I adore Pratchett as a person I have a limited tolerance for his style of humor. I dip in every once in a while, I have read Monstrous Regiment, but his books never manage to be particular favorites of mine.

You are a scholar and a gentleman good sir.

I'm really tempted to write a take down of the Blake books, have been for years. But there's so damn many I could do 2 a month and it would still take more than a year, and that hot mess deserves to be picked apart in brutal detail.

Edit, because I have no self restraint. Re: Throne of Glass.

Spoiler

It really is that bad. Certainly worse than City of Bones, which I found nearly unreadable. It's worse technically, I can't speak for the Polish version but the English was pretty damn rough, there was no refinement there. It's also worse conceptually, Clare at least knew what the fuck she was writing. Graceling, which I keep complaining about, also knows what it was even if the execution is lacking. I have no idea why Throne of Glass exists. Yeah yeah, assassin Cinderella, fine. As ScottPress pointed out the book proceeded to not be that at all. I haven't the slightest why Maas set out to write an assassin character in the first place, given her apparent lack of interest in actually writing that.

Also, would you believe I never noticed how stupid the glass castle was? I was so busy being bewildered by how quickly the book became this weird princess/romance fantasy with no apparent relation to the stated premise. Now that it's been pointed out, wouldn't it have been so much easier to just have an actual glass throne? That's pretty much a ready made metaphor for the fragility of power, you might even have been able to pretend there was a theme in there somewhere. I mean, blunt as hell, but not exploiting things that obvious is exactly what I mean by the writing have zero refinement to speak of.

 

13thadaption

Few things can compare to enjoying a shared hatred of the same terrible book. And bravo for pointing out the missed opportunity with a glass throne metaphor, I didn't notice it myself, being wholly absorbed by the stupidity of Celaena's character. I was thinking of finding the book's review page on Amazon and copypasting my rant there. Might I borrow this clever point you made and add it to my own review?

 

Go for it, stupid this potent demands teamwork to dismantle sometimes.