Oh dear gods this book is awful. I mean, really awful.
Now I’ve read a lot of awful books lately – usually because
they’ve had some social justice fails that are inexcusable like the House
of Night series and the Shifters
series. So very inexcusable
This is not the case with this book (don’t get me wrong,
it’s not exactly stellar on that front), this is terrible because it reads like
it was written by a 10 year old. It has that level of complexity
This has been the problem with this series for a while now, I’ve complained before about the utter simplicity of the world setting, especially as they’ve expanded too many alien creatures and worlds. I’ve also complained at the utterly simplistic lack of conflict in the conflict with such terribly un-nuanced abilities like being able to “smell” evil (and, of course, the evil being so very very very evil and lacking in nuance or development that you can just kill them). This is the tone of this book. The evil is evil and you just have to kill it (it has no reason to be evil. It’s just evil). It has no subtlety, no difficulty in identification. It’s just evil.
This book takes this whole child-like simplicity and
takes it tenfold further.
Firstly there’s Lissa, Supreme Queen of Mary
Sues. Oh dear gods she is. And this Sue-ishness is the core of why
everything in this book is simple to the point of boring. There are no
challenges, none at all. There can’t be. Lissa has super powers, powers that
completely eclipse everyone and everything. We open this book with a desperate
struggle where the forces of good (and their amazing super powers) are being
completely overwhelmed until Lissa arrives and destroys nearly the entire army
by herself. There are creatures that are literally destroying entire planets
which Lissa completely wipes out in her free time between dinner dates. And the
closing scenes of this book involve Lissa pulling off completely unexplained
god-like feats with no damn explanation at all. She just ZAP decides the bad
guys can no longer have their powers – and lo, entire species across the galaxy
are fundamentally changed in terms of magic, physical abilities and lifespan.
Where she gets these powers? I don’t know. And it doesn’t
even matter – it’s just a ridiculous over the top tool. Even if you could justify
your protagonist having these powers, it’d still be a bad idea because it
destroys any kind of tension in the plot. Sure we generally expect the
protagonist to win, and the genre is full of protagonists who have awesome
powers who we know will win in the end – but when Anita
Blake pulls another load of super powers from her vagina, there’s at least an
attempt to present the conflict as an actual conflict with the suggestion that
Anita COULD lose, that there’s an actual fight
Not in this book. Lissa shows up. The enemy dies. There’s
no conflict here. Lissa shows up. Super powers happen. Enemy dies. This isn’t
conflict – stepping on an ant has more conflict than this. And it’s boring
