Reading time: I’m embarrassed to say. But too long.

Star Rating: 4 stars. I’m giving it four because I actually stopped reading and read another book in between it and that says a lot. I almost never do that. I was going to give it three, but the author in me just can’t.

Okay. okay. So the first two books in this series, Red Queen, and Glass Sword were really good and I enjoyed them. This one. Whew. Man. This one was really difficult for me to get through in the beginning honestly.

It started off so slow. I actually stopped reading at 80 pages in and read a different book in two days and finished another one I had been reading after that. Which is fine. But then, I literally had to force myself to go back to this book. I didn’t enjoy reading it as much as I hoped. I dragged myself through most of the book.

The main character, Mare. Where do I start? I really did like her in the first two and I wanted to like her in this one, truly, I did. But I could not stand her in this book. She was so whiny. And I don’t just mean whiny in the sense that she complained a little bit, I mean she was so down on herself and her situation that she whined constantly through this book. Every step of the way. And that made it really hard for me to enjoy reading it.

Another thing I wasn’t sure how to feel about is introducing two other points of view. It wasn’t done in the other books, but was done in this one for the sake of convenience. The beginning was boring enough, if the author didn’t add in a character, in this case, Cameron, a young girl Mare forced to join the rebel group, The Scarlet Guard, to tell what was going on within the rebel part of the story, it would have been a million times more boring. I didn’t like it at first, but I came around to it, when it helped me understand everything that was happening on the other side of the revolution.

With all that being said, after she *spoiler* FINALLY got rescued from the mad king, Maven, the book took off from there and I enjoyed it a lot more. But it did take a long time for it to get off the ground.

Reds and Silvers working together to overthrow a king whose mother basically tore apart his mind and changed the way he felt about people close to him.

I’m really looking forward to the next book in the series, War Storm, out in May.

If you are looking for a good dystopian series, I definitely recommend this one.