Review: Realm Breaker

Realm Breaker by Victoria Aveyard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's been a minute since Victoria Aveyard - who established me as a lifetime passenger aboard her hype train with the Red Queen series - published a full-length novel, and once again, she shows just how many leaps and bounds she's made in her craft since she started publishing six years ago. Though this story has a few pebbles in its path, and does tend to feel a bit like so much Prolonged Prologue, it's still pretty easy to round the 3.5 up to a 4 for this one.

As much as I love Red Queen, it does feel like that book was pretty boilerplate compared to what Aveyard served up over the remaining novels in that series, and certainly to this one. Here, we get a lot of clear influences from The Stormlight Archive - only a small handful of supernatural beings remain, along with their portal technology, and at least one of these immortals is bound and determined to wreck the entire world in service to his ambitions - as well as The Priory of the Orange Tree, with a vast, sprawling fantasy world with numerous countries drawing inspiration from numerous cultures and climates. (Aveyard cites mostly Mediterranean, North African, and Middle Eastern influences, though I also detect a lot of Scandinavian, sub-Saharan, and Central and East Asian influences as well.)

Aveyard plays fast and loose in a lot of ways with genre conventions and rules here, as well as YA age group conventions. Most notably, while we have multiple POVs, very few of these characters develop any sort of romance - with the exception of one (already notorious) romance with the villain, extra ironic given that Aveyard used to snark so heavily on people shipping Mare with Maven (and with good reason, Maven was the WORST!) She also deliberately shies away from the first-person present-tense POVs that populated all her previous books (and a lot of other YA dystopians from The Hunger Games on down).

This, though, tends to backfire with me - I've often found myself disappointed in third-person POVs that feel disconnected from the characters in my mind, and with so many POV characters in this one, Aveyard really doesn't do as well with fleshing them out as she did in her first series. I mean, War Storm had five distinct POVs (Mare, Iris, Evangeline, Cal, and Maven), but in this book, the only three I remember super well are Corayne (since she's supposed to be the main character, but sadly doesn't stand out nearly as well as she should), as well as Dom and Andry, who are there in the thick of things in the book's actionized prologue and, quite honestly, should have been the protagonists all along, I think. And Sorasa too, I suppose, though I feel like for all the hype I see from other readers, she doesn't get nearly as much POV time as she deserves. Erida deserves special mention only because, well, she's kind of the Evangeline of this book, though probably not gonna eventually turn out to be lesbian. (I could be wrong, though. I guess we'll see.)

So while I'm not quite as into this book as I was with Aveyard's signature series (and still somewhat salty that we haven't been getting hide nor hair of the promise of Red Thunder), I'm still holding out high hopes for the remaining two books. Or remaining three - wasn't RQ a trilogy at first too, before Aveyard got to announce a fourth book? Given that Realm Breaker shot to the top of the bestseller list right away, I'd be super surprised if her history didn't repeat itself.

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