All This Twisted Glory by Tahereh MafiMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Last year, when I read the second book of Tahereh Mafi's current series, I expected that that book was the middle of a trilogy - hadn't it been announced as such at first? But since then, Mafi not only announced that this new book would not be the end of the series after all, but that she's planning as many as five books total in the series. Now, as much as I love Mafi's work, and she's never losing her position as one of the prettiest prose stylists in the business...I have to say, this series has been unusually hard for me to get into compared to her earlier work.
I really think it's down to the characters - even though Alizeh is the star of the show, this book really places a lot of emphasis on Cyrus and his emotions, enough that I actually came to dislike him somewhat because he started reminding me uncomfortably of Adam's negative character development in Ignite Me. But then it's not entirely his fault he's so heartsick, not when that capering little devil Iblees keeps mocking him with ridiculous rhymes like he's Rumpelstiltskin on Once Upon a Time. And meanwhile, Kamran becomes nebulous as hell as a character in this book, with a retinue of increasingly annoying hangers-on following him around. Needless to say, I kept really hoping to jump back to Alizeh or even Cyrus chapters every time it was Kamran's POV instead.
But despite the surprisingly little character development and the narrative showing just how much it's spinning its wheels, Mafi is nowhere close to losing me as a consistent reader, and I really hope she has some great work in mind for Books 4 and 5...
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