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litty_lydi 's review for:
The Queen of Nothing
by Holly Black
medium-paced
Having this book be the follow-up to The Wicked King, it had some big shoes to fill for me, but unfortunately it didn't quite hit all the marks that it's predecessor did.
I do think this is a satisfying conclusion to the series, and I can't picture it ending a better way. I think it was more the progress to get to that ending, tied into some pacing issues. I typically wouldn't care too much about the book being relatively short when comparing to most final books of a series, if the story could be properly concluded in that time. But it just wasn't quite there for me. I felt like I needed a little bit more in the beginning, and a lot more in the end.
Gotta go into spoilers to really sum up my thoughts around this.
So the resolution to the exile twist from Wicked King fell a little flat for me... look I loved the Notebook-esque missed letters plot just as much as the next person, but given the usual more politically motivated decisions this one just didn't cut it. Especially given Cardan would've pardoned Jude almost right away. Just comes off as a more petty response which is not the vibe I wanted. In my opinion, Holly Black definitely had the pages to flesh this out more and come up with something that had a little more ~spice~.
Speaking of places that could've used more pages to flesh them out, the SNAKE PLOT. Look I'm still trying to wrap my head around what happened there, where it came from, and more importantly why it only came in the last 20% of the book. I don't hate the idea of it, I can get behind it, but I need a bit more set-up and explanation there. There's always a chance that I am just a surface level reader and HB has been dropping serpent hits throughout the other two books that I was not picking up but ... give me some extra pages to help me make sense of it all.
On my personal Wishlist, I'd also like more pages dedicated to the post-"war" (I hate to call it that because for an author who wrote quite a bit of gruesome deaths in this book, she took the Stephanie Meyer Breaking Dawn out of not having to write a war because talking helped lol)Jude/Cardan relationship.
Also, wishlist-y, I think this was the only book of the series where I was really missing some multiple POVs. Give me the scene of Cardan showing up in the human world looking for Jude.
I do think this is a satisfying conclusion to the series, and I can't picture it ending a better way. I think it was more the progress to get to that ending, tied into some pacing issues. I typically wouldn't care too much about the book being relatively short when comparing to most final books of a series, if the story could be properly concluded in that time. But it just wasn't quite there for me. I felt like I needed a little bit more in the beginning, and a lot more in the end.
Gotta go into spoilers to really sum up my thoughts around this.
So the resolution to the exile twist from Wicked King fell a little flat for me... look I loved the Notebook-esque missed letters plot just as much as the next person, but given the usual more politically motivated decisions this one just didn't cut it. Especially given Cardan would've pardoned Jude almost right away. Just comes off as a more petty response which is not the vibe I wanted. In my opinion, Holly Black definitely had the pages to flesh this out more and come up with something that had a little more ~spice~.
Speaking of places that could've used more pages to flesh them out, the SNAKE PLOT. Look I'm still trying to wrap my head around what happened there, where it came from, and more importantly why it only came in the last 20% of the book. I don't hate the idea of it, I can get behind it, but I need a bit more set-up and explanation there. There's always a chance that I am just a surface level reader and HB has been dropping serpent hits throughout the other two books that I was not picking up but ... give me some extra pages to help me make sense of it all.
On my personal Wishlist, I'd also like more pages dedicated to the post-"war" (I hate to call it that because for an author who wrote quite a bit of gruesome deaths in this book, she took the Stephanie Meyer Breaking Dawn out of not having to write a war because talking helped lol)Jude/Cardan relationship.
Also, wishlist-y, I think this was the only book of the series where I was really missing some multiple POVs. Give me the scene of Cardan showing up in the human world looking for Jude.