This collection of five novellas is all about Celaena's life in her prime as Adarlan's Assassin. Unfortunately, she spends more time having moral crises than she does having adventures, and I found the first four stories pretty boring.

I liked the story line with Ansel, and the novellas do work well together, but Maas writes better in long stories and the novellas just don't do her writing justice.

The fifth book definitely tugged at my heartstrings, but, having read Throne of Glass, I already knowing everything I needed to know about Sam and so the payoff didn't hurt as much as it should. I wish that her and Sam's relationship had been better developed. Her hating him in the first book was too jarring for me to accept her love for him by the end.

Even better than the first. Now that Celaena is officially the Champion, we can get right down to brass tacks: she is really good at killing, and we really need to figure out what the fuck is up with the king. Maas expertly weaves together Celaena's history, the king's ruthlessness, Nehemia's hope, and the two dashing-est men in the kingdom into an action-packed volume.

I don't know what happened, but this book was really boring.

I didn't like that it was switching between Chaol's moral dilemmas (which were dull), Celaena's training (hasn't she been through enough of this?!?!), and new character Manon Blackbeak's witch problems (hers was quite good, but didn't fit well with everything else).

The ending was truly brutal and spectacular, but it still felt like a filler book.

Celaena, now going by her real name, is back in Rifthold, but without her magic or Rowan. And that's not even the worst of it.

It felt like Maas got a much better handle this book on twining together the different narratives -- Manon's story was more compelling this time around and didn't feel quite so much like a word count boost. The characters all feel so grown up in this book compared to where they started, as they try to move forward while dealing with scars that will never truly fade.

The ending was incredible and I cried like three times.

This book makes a transition from the young adult feel of the first half of the series into the decidedly adult feel of the second half. There is so much danger, plotting, history, and sex that it feels like adult high fantasy. It is no longer a story about teenagers finding their place in a fucked up world. Now it's a story about young adults trying to save the world, no matter the cost.

This story made my heart break in a million different ways.

God, this was boring. Book 5 was so intense throughout and ended on such a brutal note that picking up this felt like going backwards. There just wasn't enough going on to make an entire book about Chaol, who was pretty boring to start with, all that engaging.

I did like that a lot of new information was unearthed and I liked learning about the healers, but this whole thing could have just been a few extra chapters interspersed through the 5th book and the end result would have been the same.

Spoiler

I really liked that the end felt like Daenerys's triumphant return to Westeros with all of her ships at the end of season 6 of GOT. But I really hated that horrible teaser of Aelin waking up about to be tortured. I don't want to have to see Aelin recover emotionally from torture in book 7. I've seen her do that enough.

I basically cried for five days straight because that's how long it took me to read this. I loved every single sentence of this entire, enormous book. What an amazing thing, to have a series that ends even better than it began.

Fun and outrageous and realistic in that magical combination that Sloan managed in Mr. Penumbra. This book will make you crave so much bread (and maybe a robot arm.)

Funny and cynical. Crazy to think how little the world has changed in 25 years.

This was a pretty terrible collection. Tons of stories felt recycled--Douglas Spaulding was in like 85 of them, as was Heber Finn's pub, with two different spellings. The Mars stories felt moralistic and mostly gross. His depiction of female characters is absolutely appalling. There were a few good stories, but it was hardly worth wading through the muck.