booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

IRON HEART follows what happened after Crier ran away from her wedding, and Ayla ran away from her failure to kill Crier. 

The worldbuilding from CRIER'S WAR is built on and complicated slightly in IRON HEART. This is everything from revealing the true nature of heartstone's production, to making it clear that humans and Automae have fallen in love before. My favorite bit is the technically-not-zombies, they're handled in a pretty cool way and make several appearances. I also love Queen Junn, she's a fantastic character.

This is the second book of a duology, and the the whole point of it is to wrap up things left hanging from CRIER’S WAR, which it does admirably. It gives resolutions to a bunch of characters (major and minor), untangles several heartstone-related mysteries, and handles atrocities, both recent and longstanding. There’s a minor storyline which begins and ends in this volume, and this focuses more on journeys than the first one did. As the final book it deals with systemic injustices which were established in the first one, doing so in ways that free most individuals from the oppressed/oppressor dynamics which were getting in the way of this sapphic love story. It wrapped up hanging plot threads and provided closure for several characters in ways I wasn’t expecting, which is nice. The point-of-view characters are the same, and they're consistent with their previous voices even though they've grown and changed throughout both books. 

The story is complete enough and backstory recapped succinctly such that someone could probably pick up this book without having read the first one and have a good experience. It'll definitely be better for anyone reading the whole duology, but the recaps at the beginning are well done and the story can stand alone enough to makes sense. 

The main plot alternates at first between Ayla in Queen Junn's court and Crier on the road, eventually merging the two threads when Ayla also has to travel. Their individual goals complement each other, but they have different pieces of the puzzle that a bunch of people are trying to solve, and don't realize it at first. 

I originally had misgivings about this as an oppressor/oppressed romance, but I waited to see how things ended up. I'm so pleased about the choice to address the systemic inequalities rather than just having Ayla and Crier defy the odds or something. Even better, IRON HEART makes it clear that they aren't the first Automa/human couple and they won't be the last. They individually join up with existing efforts to solve the problems, not trying to reinvent the networks that other people have put in place over years. Also, Crier and Ayla have unique access to specific information, and particular connections with others that let them do what they're doing, but a bunch of other people's specific efforts are highlighted throughout. It makes them feel like people who happened to be in a position to do something to help, not destined heroes whose presence magically fix things it shouldn't have fixed. 

I devoured this, finishing the whole thing in two days. Crier is Made, one of the Automae who took over several decades before her creation and displaced the humans who made the first of them. Humans now are servants at best, slaves at worst, full of unrest and needing a revolution. Ayla has dreamed for years of getting back at the local Automae leader for her own brother's death by killing his daughter, but when she becomes Lady Crier's servant things stop feeling so simple after all.

Ayla's closest human friend is in love with her, but she doesn't seem to reciprocate his feelings. I'm not sure whether that's because she doesn't want to get him killed, or if she completely lacks romantic and/or feelings toward him. 

Crier and Ayla don't trust each other but find themselves drawn to each other's company. Crier has almost no friends and is newly betrothed to an Automa fomenting a different kind of revolution, one which would move away from human trappings entirely in a city devoid of life except for the Made. Ayla wanted to kill a specific powerful Automa's child, but before she can she begins to maybe think of that Automae as Crier, possibly a person, and not so easy to let herself kill. The romance between Ayla and Crier builds very slowly and fits their situation. They share intimate connections because of Ayla's role as Crier's servant, but those connections feel one-way because what Crier feels as kindness is a job for Ayla. However, the fact that Ayla has spent years planning to kill Crier means that she has feelings for the Automa which are as intense as Crier's for her... they're just not necessarily the same kind of feeling. 

The worldbuilding for the Automae and the humans is detailed enough to feel like a real place, but it focuses mainly on the ways that the Automae do or do not attempt to mimic humans in their society and structures. It means that a great many concepts and items can be lifted wholesale and then used by the Automae in slightly different ways from how a human would have meant them. The political machinations hit the right balance of intrigue and complexity for me, stopping shy of becoming confusing by keeping the number of important characters and factions small but having their plans have multiple layers. This uses cross-purposes between supposed allies and complementary tactics between nominal enemies in a way that's deliciously messy. 

I love this and I'll read the sequel as soon as I can, I want to know how things resolve for everyone. I don't necessarily want Crier and Ayla to end up together (not without having several truthful conversations first), but I'm excited to see how this story goes.

“Alpha and Omega” by Patricia Briggs takes place during the events of MOON CALLED, and answers what Charles was doing after Mercy alerted Bran about problems in one of the Chicago packs. It stars Anna and Charles, and is the prequel to a full novel, CRY WOLF, which is the first in the Alpha and Omega companion series in the same world as the Mercedes Thompson books. It’s my favorite one in the collection, and the story which draws me to re-reading this book. Highly Recommend.

I don’t like “Inhuman”, it feels unfriendly to casual readers. Last time I read it I was reading a lot of Eileen Wilks’s work alongside it and I found it just as confusing and impenetrable then. It’s set in the World of the Lupi series (of which I’ve read at least five books), but fails to sufficiently explain whatever is happening. It seems to assume I already know these characters. At this point I don’t know if something is just not connecting for me or if it’s the story itself, but I’ve never liked this one. If you’re reading the World of the Lupi books, this goes right before NIGHT SEASON. Not Recommended.

“Buying Trouble” starts out well and the middle is good, but the ending was weird and included the main character having a body-shaming relationship with her own second form which newly manifested. That soured how much I had been enjoying the story. I do like it overall, but that one issue was frustrating, however brief, and served to highlight a bunch of very troubling implications of the worldbuilding. Not Recommended.

“Mona Lisa Betwining” is part of the Monère series, but I have not yet read any of those books. It immediately refers to a character having died who seems like they were probably important in one of the full novels, so this might spoil some plot points. It mostly makes sense on its own without having read the other books, but that’s because it’s one-third conversation, one-third backstory, and one-third explicit sex scenes (split between two of them), so there isn’t a whole lot of plot to worry about. Recommend.

I don’t like the narration in second person.

This is a mediocre conclusion to what promised to be a great series. It long, slow, and boring, with repetitive angst and worry from characters who keep choosing to delay happiness on offer until right before it gets taken away. This then makes them feel like any happiness they do get will be temporary, and then they delay longer the next time. Once or twice was interesting, but it happens over and over to the point of being predictable. The only couple who actually get a happy ending is one where one of them has technically already died. The Nightbringer was way more interesting as Keenan, and I kind of wish that they had either been two different characters, or that the series had waited longer to reveal his real identity. Being an enemy who's over a thousand years old doesn't actually have to remove a character from being in the running in a love triangle (as most vampire books can attest), but this series seems to have resolved its various relationships by killing off family, friends, partners, and potential love interests seemingly at random. I have no problem with books killing off characters, but the way their vibrancy and uniqueness was bled away before most of the deaths contributed to the dull feeling of this whole book.

I like Elias/The Soul Catcher as a character, and he does the best he can with his magically-induced memory loss. I don't like how that memory loss comes in and out on the whims of a different supernatural being, as it takes coincidence and turns it into something that's explicitly another character's decision to take away Elias's choices and leave him with the Soul Catcher's cold resolve.

It doesn't feel like Laia learned anything, she grows the least of any of the characters and I found her chapters to be very frustrating. Helene adapts to her situation and changes much more, but her character growth tended to come a hair too late to save the ones she loves.

Throughout the series, The Nightbringer is turned from this intense rebel as Keenan into this angry being who can't be reasoned with and doesn't seem to have retained any of the lessons he had the opportunity to learn as Keenan. Laia hangs on to the memory of him, and that serves to hold her back rather than to build the Nightbringer as a villain. He and the Commandant get specifically turned into understandable people by the end in ways that feel way too timely and convenient.

Most of the new worldbuilding is related to the mysterious Storm, but even that was more confusing than interesting. It takes so long to get any new details that by the time I got answers I'd lost most of my interest in the questions. Reading this series is a slow slide from a really intriguing start into a bunch of angst, wishing, and churning the same regrets over and over. It feels like a huge chunk of the third book should have been excised, as well as a bunch of this one, and combined the remaining portions of both books to make this a trilogy rather than a quartet. Collectively, they're padded with indecision, people refusing to help, Elias and Laia worrying about the same things over and over again, and people waiting for other things to get worse before they can do anything. A bunch of characters have information but are either barred from conveying it or just refuse to do so for unexplained reasons. A lot of the momentum is lost by Elias losing his memory and getting access to bits of it again. War is often boredom punctuated by death and terror, but I wasn't expecting 80% of the book to be boring to match it. I only made it through as an audiobook because I could zone out occasionally but still get through it. As much as I loved the first two books, by the time I was a third of the way through this one I just wanted it to be over.

There’s also an instance where a character who died in the third book turns out to be alive and plays a key role in the final big battle. They come out of nowhere, and feels so out of place that other characters question them to try and understand how they’re actually alive. They show up at exactly the right time to do one more thing, and then their presence is the solution to another problem (but they could still have been the solution if they had actually died when originally thought). 

The audiobook narrators did a great job with this whole series, they made this boring and seemingly endless story bearable.

As the final book in the series, this wrapped up hanging threads from the previous books, but it tended to do so by killing off interesting characters once they'd been reduced to having no characterization beyond being an ally, family member, or potential love interest to the main characters. This tried to have a new storyline with the Storm and the reveal of the Nightbringer's big plan, but his big plan isn't very detailed and mostly is a roundabout way of burning the world down. Technically this resolves the question of whether Laia and Elias will end up together, but they spent so little time actually building a relationship that even that feels lackluster. Character memory loss doesn't have to steal opportunities for relationships! But pairing that memory loss with a "no attachments, no emotions" persona just wrecked their chemistry for me, since Laia spent a while with no reason to believe that Elias would return to himself or remember her in a meaningful way, or that he could even return to humanity and leave his duties if he did. It's a book, so of course her pining happens to work out, but I don't like how that was handled.

The point-of-view characters from the previous book all returned here, plus a brief view from the Commandant which felt very unnecessary. Elias and the Soul Catcher didn't feel very different, except in what they were willing/able to discuss. The Nightbringer sounds like he did in his brief narration from the previous book, but he feels very different from himself as Keenan. 

It would not make sense to start here. It's a very long wrap-up of better stories begun elsewhere, and can't stand on its own. 

I don't have a great sense of the plot. They need to figure out the Nightbringer's plan and figure out how to stop him and the Commandant, and they manage to get that information somehow out of beings who knew it but either couldn't or wouldn't give it earlier. All of this takes way too long. For an ending I endured so much book to receive, it resolved so neatly as to feel cheap, which is not how I want to feel about these characters.

Louise has structured her life around access to blood, a necessity for a vampire. But this cycle of subsistence living keeps her from being able to make a go of other opportunities when they come along. Her few close connections (her aunt and her friend Marshall) have both died, and she hasn't really tried to make any new ones in the years since. She has an adorable dog, and the pattern of her nights is shaped by working at the hospital, getting blood, occasionally trying out for music gigs, and taking care of her corgi. There's a vampire trying to organize the community, but Louise mistrusts his sunny personality and his technologically invasive methods, mostly trying to avoid him as much as possible. When a local blood shortage threatens her and many other vampires' continued existence, this becomes much more difficult to manage.

The worldbuilding is a mix of musical ideas and music references, facts about being a vampire, and the slowly unfurling tale of how Louise ran away from home and become a vampire in her early twenties. I'm not musically inclined and didn't know most of the songs and musicians being referenced, but each time they were discussed in context with what they invoke and their place in the history of music in a way that was interesting and informative without feeling like a lecture.

The plot revolves around Louise receiving an unexpected visit by a grandfather and grandson as the boy's mother is in the hospital dying of cancer. The pair are somehow related to Louise but it takes a while before she figures out exactly how (plus her vampirism means she looks only a decade older than the kid). The main story proceeds pretty linearly, punctuated by flashbacks as Louise is processing previous events with new understanding of herself. Interacting with these new people shakes her out of her normal patterns and it takes a bit to adjust. 

The ending feels a bit neat, like too huge of a thing manages to be sorted out in a way that supposedly fixes things as much as possible. I think the bit that's bugging me is it feels like Louise is the supporting character for both of the main storylines (Ian dealing with his mother's impending death, and Eric trying to make things better for vampires), but by being present exactly where she is she ends up helping with both things. She actually feels like if a regular person who happened to be a vampire had to deal with this stuff but didn't budge an inch on taking care of her dog and talking about music. 

This was great and I highly recommend it for anyone who wishes music, vampires, and family trauma overlapped more often.

I generally have trouble keeping track of names, and the dizzying array of point-of-view characters made it too difficult to continue, especially in combination with the slow pacing. It makes it feel like too many people are talking and nothing is happening. Even the very brief battle wasn't enough to help. I tried to read it for two months but it started feeling like a chore so I stopped. 

I was hoping for dragons, what I got was a book about not talking about dragons. The metaphor is clear, but repetitive and slow.

Laia takes a very long time to figure out what she should be doing. Elias knows what he should be doing but keeps trying to figure out a way to not do it and get the same result. Helene knows what she is doing but no idea if things will work out in the face of the malevolence around her.

There's a revelation about one character's identity which ended up feeling very anticlimactic for me, as I'd guessed it when I read the first book. It felt a bit like nothing else would have made sense. That's good, since it means the writing up until the reveal completely supported the revelation and was reliably telegraphing the direction of the story. It reinforced a feeling of frustration with how this character does things and why, while also not adding much in the moment. 

This continues some things left hanging from the second book, and the things it wraps up are interesting but don't feel as emotionally significant. As the third book of four, it moves a lot of things into place which seem like they'll be critical for the final book. Book one was slavery and escape, book two was a months-long journey culminating in a rescue attempt, but this third book focuses more on trying to make certain bad things not happen. Best case, it's a holding action, worst case it's a series of disasters, and either way it ends feeling strange. Laia and her brother are working with a new contact to make weapons and get those weapons into the right hands, but not everyone agrees over what the right hands are. Helene is trying to keep her pregnant sister alive, and to foil the Commandant wherever she can. Elias is learning his new role in the Waiting Place, finding out just what that entails and how much it will distort his original humanity. The pregnancy and the weapons-making are almost new storylines, but they did have their start at the very end of the second book. Laia, Elias, and Helene are the main narrators, with brief appearances from the Nightbringer at the beginning and end of the book. Their voices are consistent with the previous books, while feeling distinct from each other. 

Several things are left hanging for the final book to address, including but not limited to Elias's and Laia's fates, the devastation of the cities, and the final stages of the Nightbringer's plan. I can't think of anything major that was both introduced and resolved. Most of the important things were at least mentioned as possible plans in the second book. It leaves this murky feeling that this book is essential for the overall arc of the series, with several extremely important moments within it, but the ebb and flow of the story itself feels very forgettable. 

It would not make sense to start with this book and not have read either of the others. This is a narrative bridge to get from the second book to the finale, it's full of revelations and secrets which have lingered for a while. Once those things are brought to light, the characters can act on them in the final book, but encountering them here as the introduction would feel largely pointless. There's worldbuilding for the Mariners, who haven't appeared until now, but other than that a lot of the background is carried over from the first two books and only lightly re-explained. 

The main plot is a tangle of overlapping threads, making of them picking up on things begun earlier, then culminating in one hectic night which synchronizes them in time but not necessarily in theme or purpose. Helene's story is the strongest for me, with clear goals, a specific enemy, and where it's easy to tell if she fails (if her pregnant sister or the forthcoming baby die, that's a problem). Elias is trying to find out how to do the seemingly impossible task of helping all the ghosts move on, and his path towards that answer is full of a lot of back and forth, exiting and re-entering the forest of the Waiting Place. Laia's goals keep changing, as she wants bad things not to happen and good things to happen, but is having trouble figuring out what bad she's willing to accept in defense of which good. Given that the world isn't perfect (and her particular slice of it is filled with a bunch of people willing to do a whole lot of murder for their own goals), that indecision is giving her trouble.

Overall this feels necessary to the arc of the series while being largely forgettable for long stretches. There's a lot of places in the middle where it feels like it's repeating an emotional beat that already happened, or drawing out something for way too long. The end is very strong and I like the story overall, but it's not my favorite in the series so far.

A TORCH AGAINST THE NIGHT begins where AN EMBER IN THE ASHES left off, with Elias and Laia having just escaped so that Laia can attempt a rescue of her brother from the prison, Kauf.

The worldbuilding focuses on the Tribes more this time around, maintaining things established in the first book but not doing as much worldbuilding for the other groups and locations. One thing that's new is the Waiting Place where Shaeva helps the dead pass on. A lot of new backstory and worldbuilding is conveyed to Elias there, gradually through a series of conversations.

One of my favorite things about the structure of this series is that Laia and Elias each have another person they're interested in. Rather than a standard love triangle, this creates something more tangled where it's uncertain whether they're both interested in a relationship with each other. Any potential romance takes a backseat for much of the book because of the circumstances of their journey, but there's just enough there to keep things interesting. I like how Keenan's storyline plays out, I genuinely didn't guess what was going on with him and I'm pretty pleased with the reveal. Helene isn't around the others as much, but I like that because her chapters get a chance to be on their own rather than echoing Elias's, since in the first book we only saw Helene through Elias (and very occasionally Laia). 

Each of the characters have specific and very understandable reasons for acting at cross-purposes. Some of those justifications are definitely on the evil side, but so far none of the characters are evil for the sake of it. Their justifications may be power, security, making sure no one can do to them what they're doing to everyone else, but there's always a reason. In a series that seems determined to add perspectives with each sequel, that's not an easy feat. I don't have to like all of the point-of-view characters in order to enjoy the book. Even when I vehemently disagree with them it's not a frustrating reading experience, instead it's highly engaging.  

This is the second book in a quartet, and it wraps up a pretty important thing left hanging from the first book, since this is where the planned attempt to rescue Laia's brother is made. The journey itself functions mostly as a new storyline, though technically it began at the very end of the first book. Several smaller things are resolved, but the first book ends on a cliffhanger and then this one picks up immediately where it left off, which makes it harder for me to remember which things where mentioned at the end of the first vs the beginning of the second. Some things related to Helene are specifically left for later in a way that makes me think they may drive the third book. Helene is a new narrator, her perspectives joining the rotation with Laia and Elias. Laia and Elias are consistent with themselves in the first book, though they do change gradually in this one (especially Elias). There's an audiobook narrator for each perspective, Laia, Elias, and Helene. I like the performances, they did a good job. 

This begins exactly where the first book left off, with Laia and Elias running through the tunnels. Reminders of what happened in the first book are doled out slowly, when the characters have a moment to think while running for their lives. It wouldn't make sense to start here, since the main plot is the second half of the story begun in the first book. Since it's a quartet it does set up plenty to keep the story going, but Laia became a slave in the first book in hopes of getting her brother rescued and this book is about the journey for that rescue attempt. Beginning here without having that setup would make a lot of the story less satisfying.

Laia and Elias are traveling to Kauf to rescue Laia's brother. They're joined by some characters from the first book, and the party splits and reconfigures several times as they get help along the way. Helene is the Blood Shrike, trying to deal with the hateful Commandant's machinations from the inside, all while under the thumb of the new emperor. In an attempt to get back at Laia and the resistance, the Commandant is using her influence to try and wipe out the Scholars and anyone she thinks of as helping them. These plot threads intersect more towards the end, establishing a new status quo going into the third book. 

I enjoyed this and will keep reading the series!