Pages

28/07/2015

Throne of Glass - Sarah J Maas

Throne of Glass - Sarah J Maas 
"After serving out a year of hard labor in the salt mines of Endovier for her crimes, 18-year-old assassin Celaena Sardothien is dragged before the Crown Prince. Prince Dorian offers her her freedom on one condition: she must act as his champion in a competition to find a new royal assassin.

Her opponents are men-thieves and assassins and warriors from across the empire, each sponsored by a member of the king's council. If she beats her opponents in a series of eliminations, she'll serve the kingdom for three years and then be granted her freedom. Celaena finds her training sessions with the captain of the guard, Westfall, challenging and exhilirating. But she's bored stiff by court life. Things get a little more interesting when the prince starts to show interest in her... but it's the gruff Captain Westfall who seems to understand her best.

Then one of the other contestants turns up dead... quickly followed by another. Can Celaena figure out who the killer is before she becomes a victim? As the young assassin investigates, her search leads her to discover a greater destiny than she could possibly have imagined." - Goodreads


If you want this book to be about a badass assassin who actually assassinates people and isn't all talk and no action, then you're in the wrong place. 
That's what I wanted, but what I got was not even close to that. 

I tried to read this book back when it first came out, I got about 4% in and decided I'd rather stab myself in the stomach than continue. After all the hype about it came around and I started seeing more and more of it, and how amazing the rest of the series was, I decided to give it another go. 
And I don't know whether I liked it or not. Now I had this love/hate relationship with it, when I was reading it, I felt like I didn't want to and wanted to read something else - but when I put it down.. I kept thinking about it.  

At the very beginning, okay until about 40%, I couldn't get into this. There was so much unnecessary description, that I just kept skimming and skipping whole paragraphs. It was hard to follow along, it was hard to pronounce certain names, it was just an effort to read. I found my mind constantly drifting to other things, i.e. what I'm going to make for dinner or whether or not I washed my favourite jeans etc. That's really not what I want to be happening whilst I read a book. 

Nevertheless, I pushed on through because of the comments I kept getting: "The second book is much better, just pass this one and it'll be amazing, you won't regret it" or "The end of the book is a lot better, I found it hard to get into too, but it does get better, trust me!" So of course, I did and continued reading. 

Around 30% in, I started questionning whether or not anything even relatively exciting was going to happen- and it honestly took another 30% for it to even start. Better late than never I guess. 

I despised Celaena, I hated her attitude, I hated her rudeness and the way she acted. She's one of those girls who walks around like they're the shit and says 'Excuse me, do you know who I am!!!!' She was all talk and no action. All I kept hearing was 'oh it's the assassin, she's an assassin, she's dangerous' and from her it was 'i could kill you in a second if i wanted to' or 'i could easily win this competition even if my eyes were shut and my hands were superglued to my head' but did she ever even kill anyone? Nope. Did she ever even hurt anyone (not during the tasks)? No. All she did was complain about not being invited to balls and not wearing nice dresses. YOU'RE AN ASSASSIN, STOP ACTING LIKE A QUEEN B IN HIGH SCHOOL. She really got on my nerves, a lot. I haven't disliked a character so much in a long time.

A book of this size would normally take me about 3 days to read, it took me 5 days to finish this. That's 2 extra days of struggle. That's a whole lot of reading about a hardcore, badass assassin who killed/injured pretty much no one and complained about cramps and not being invited to royal balls. 
Grow a pair. 

I do have to say that the end of the book, i.e. the last 70/80% were really good, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading the final task and thanked the good lord that there was finally some action! (Those who have read this probably know why I enjoyed reading that part so much.. it's an awful thing to enjoy)

Overall, I can't say that I would recommend this, because of all the issues stated above.. but I will continue with the second book to see if all the reviews and comments I've received are true or not.
I rated this book 2.5* on Goodreads. 

No comments:

Post a Comment