Review: Kingdom of Ash

Kingdom of Ash by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I like the title a lot more than I should. People who know me well enough will know why.

Though I'm not impressed with that bright yellow background on the cover. It's like they wanted it to look like someone got into the printer's room and went number one all over every copy. I mean, it looks better in person when the colors are a little more muted and the title shines more brightly and silver-like, but printed here on GR it looks a little...yuck.

And also...992 pages? What the bloody hell? This book is almost too thick to put on the shelves at work!


But seriously, though. This last book in the Throne of Glass series really caps the series off in style and wraps just about everything up with surprising neatness.

I do have a few small complaints, though. Like, it's too damn long for the plot that it carries, and even with a shit-ton of action to go around it feels like Maas really got carried away with jacking up the word and page count. (And of course there's her usual trend in recent years of those stupid Bible-thin pages being used in the printing again.) And there's a couple of plot points in this concluding entry that I also remember getting put to use last year in TACOWAR - I will never stop calling it that, btw. Lol. Including the one that I really wish SJM hadn't had it in her to try and pull off AGAIN, because this time I knew what was coming and it's a shame because it would otherwise have had a major emotional impact.

But for how overlong this book is, it still, for me, helps validate my decision to stick with the series when so many of my friends have given up on it for a wide variety of reasons. There's a shit-ton of action and destruction to rival George R.R. Martin - Hulu's gonna probably have to sink about half its entire budget into producing the visual effects on the Queen of Shadows TV series alone, if they ever adapt up to this point in the series. It's bloody brutal in so many ways - Aelin being tortured at the hands of Maeve after the nasty cliffhanger of Empire of Storms, tons of Valg armies on the attack, all our heroes having to shed a lot of blood in their efforts to save the world. And while I'm still pissed that my ship never sailed - I'm still bitterly wishing Rowan had never come in so that there could still be a chance of Chaolaena happening - at least both Aelin and Chaol are happy with whom they've paired up. And on the subject of pairings and acts taking place therein, like Tower of Dawn, this book isn't devoid of sex scenes, but for the most part they're pretty tame compared to what SJM published in EoS and every ACOTAR book from Mist and Fury onwards. (Though "heated silk" gets me laughing almost as much as the infamous steels all wrapped in velvet.)

Best of all, as much as I'd hoped for a little more emotional heft, the ending of this book is nothing short of hopeful - and comes off, to me, a lot more sincere about looking forward to the future than TACOWAR did with its ending that wasn't really.

To the Throne of Glass series, I now bid vas ir...anoshe. And I'm still low-key considering taking out a subscription to Hulu just for the Queen of Shadows series - a low-key that'll become high-key if #PieraFordeForCelaenaSardothien happens after all.

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