This book is a monster. 835 pages all told.
I enjoyed this book, but I do kind of feel like the sheer size of it was unnecessary. I think I was about a (quarter? third?) of the way through and Hunt was still in the dungeon, Bryce was still navigating her way through the tunnels with Nesta and I kept thinking, come on, something needs to happen already.
And maybe the lengthy scenes with Nesta and Azriel were intended to show some kind of bonding or something – Bryce does come away thinking they are good people in spite of the hostility in the way they part – but if that’s the case it didn’t really get there for me.
I also feel like there was a lot of exposition in the scene with Silene’s video record. The background story as to how Midguard came to be is great, but the way it’s revealed to the reader could use a lot more show and a lot less tell.
Having said that, once we get past those plot points the action kicks into high gear and we get the plot resolution we were hoping for.
I have a huge soft spot for the tortured bad boy trope so I have a bit of a thing for Tharion, who went from surfer dude to man of mystery to pathetic victim of his own dumb-assery in books one and two and now finally gets to play the hero in book three. I will say I don’t entirely get his self-loathing. He makes some incredibly bad decisions – the Viper Queen? Really? – but apart from being stupid he doesn’t really have a reason to hate himself as much as he does. Ithan I can get it, he has an enormous case of survivors guilt from being the only survivor of the Pack of Devils, and what happened with Sigrid was incredibly traumatizing for him.
The reaction of Ruhn to finding out who Day was felt kind of… odd? As a member of the Aux, which was basically a civilian military force it feels like he should have had to do things that felt morally unclean on occasion. Also he is friends with Hunt, who was famous for his brutality as the Umbra Mortis. So I get that processing the identity of the Hind was something that might take him a bit, still his utter rejection felt disproportionate. It feels SJM writes all her relationships in such a way that they have big relationship-ending events and then they have a reconciliation and end up together anyway.
So obviously this is the book that links all the series together. ACOTAR is the most explicit since Bryce world-hops to meet Nesta the rest of the gang. There are also strong indications that the shifters come from the TOG universe, as all the fae in TOG have elemental abilities. There is also the detail that the name of the God Urd is a corruption of Wyrd, which is straight from TOG.
A detail that I have noticed in all of Maas’s series is the trope that acting like nobility means acting rigid and cold. It came up in ACOTAR when Cassian was interacting with Eris and now again when Lidia admonishes Ruhn to act more like a Prince. Speaking as somebody who lives in a country that has a King, that expectation is honestly kind of hilarious. And Lidia herself is descended from “stags of fire” which is an actual local God from TOG, so that goes a long way to explain why she is such a badass.
A thing that did not happen that I 100% expected to happen, Hel did not betray them. I really thought it was going to turn out that Hel had their own agenda, but actually they just really hated the Astari so much that they would travel to another world to fight them. Rock on.
I thought that the association of Asteri with stars and the reveal that black holes were the only thing that could take them out was honestly brilliant. I found this article that says a surprising number of binary star systems eat their own planets, so the idea that Asteri are actual fucking intelligent predator stars is very compelling.
In spite of the fact that the Astari are gone there are four Houses and so far only three have been used for titles so I’m guessing there is going to be a forth book to end the series. Predictions!
- Tharion and Sathea become married for real and not just for convenience
- The remaining Archangels become the Big Bads
- Ithan grows into his role as Prime of the Wolves. Maybe of all the canine shifters.
- Ruhn takes on an important role in the new Fae government
I would also really like to see some important human characters apart from Bryce’s parents. Humans have things to contribute!