So, I’m really late to the party. I never read TPW whenever it first came out and I thought I might as well pick it up now because I read the first chapter on a preview and liked it.
OVERALL:
This may be an unpopular opinion from what I’ve seen on reddit but I actually enjoyed most of the book. I’ve seen reviews that people had gripes about the tonal shift halfway through the book but I think that was well done. >!Part 1 was about training and the academy but then part 2 was when the war interrupted everything.!< There was bound to be a shift. (But I also felt the need to put aside the book after I finished part 1 because I felt the shift coming. I got back into it the next day. So, maybe the shift for me was unseen.)
>!Chapter 21 was needed in the story despite how gruesome and dark it was. It showed the consequences of the war and really made the enemies inhumane. Chapter 22: the author did a good job with building up Altan only to break him down.!< I really enjoyed his character because he was so complex and deeply broken that I didn’t think there was much hope for him. However, everything after this chapter felt too rushed and didn’t feel grounded enough. Maybe it was because the first two parts gradually built upon each other but the things that happened in part 3 just felt way too rushed for me. I also had a lot more problems with Rin but I’ll get into that down below.
CHARACTERS:
I, personally, really enjoyed the characters and I think a lot of readers like >!Jiang because he’s the voice of reason. Even I think he’s cool and the one that stands out the most because he knows so much about the gods that we don’t know.!< I still appreciate the other characters like Kitay, Venka, Qara, Chaghan, Raban, etc. For me, they were so well written that even though they weren’t shown on the page as much, the events that happened to them were so real and it broke and rebuilt their character. I think that was really well done for the amount of time they are on the page.
And Altan, >!above all of them, felt like a deeply broken character and was supposed to be this way. If I threw aside Rin’s hero worship of him (because I genuinely think she doesn’t have the capacity to love), Altan seemed like a fully developed character in his own sense. He’s the guy that went through a genocide when he was 4 and then preceded to be experimented on until Hesperia got him out. Then the dude was doped up on drugs his whole life and trained to be a weapon. His hatred was so deeply ingrained in him that he became frantic and paranoid at every second when things weren’t working out their way. I thought by the end of part 2, he needed to lend the mantle to someone else because he wasn’t in the right capacity to lead but at the same time he was trained his whole life to do the things that he needed to get done.!<
MY ISSUES:
But then when I get to Rin, there were some issues with her in part 1 and 2 but nothing like what she was doing in part 3. >!I felt like she was getting tempted by the drugs and was teetering on a very, very thin line the entire time between wanting more power and then being scared of getting consumed. It makes sense why the Woman and Jiang felt like she could be brought back but it felt like a lost cause after you see how much she worshiped Altan. However, I still wasn’t really sure what her thought process was when she was going to help Altan in the end of chapter 22. Maybe her fear went away because what could possible be worse than what has already happened in Golyn Niis and then to her own people on Speer.!< I just didn’t like how internal we get with Rin in this part even though it may be necessary. I think in part 3 it became more of a hazard because of how fast paced it was. And, personally I don’t think her suffering was valid enough for the actions she would partake in at the end but maybe that was to show how far she would go and maybe that was the point.
WRITING:
I think there were a lot of deliberate moves that the author made in the story and it worked for me. The characters, >!besides Rin (by the end)!<, felt fleshed out and fully developed even the ones that were off to the side. It felt like they were their own beings and I appreciate how much we see the changes in them. I didn’t have much gripe with the writing. I thought it was honestly fine for what I was reading. I’ve read books with worse writing but I haven’t seen people bombard those the way they do with this book.
CONCLUSION:
I don’t think the ending was satisfying enough for me but it may also be the fact that it will lead into something with more depth in the next book but then again I’m also not sure since I haven’t touched the second book yet. Personally, this is why I stay away from series because I’m not sure how I would feel about book 2 or 3 but I wanted to give this book a chance because I’ve been reading a lot of heavier classics and literary fiction and felt like I needed to balance it out with something else. And I really liked it for most parts and feel compelled to continue.
I know reddit is purely a critical space and there may be more bad to say about this book than good. However, if anyone had similar gripes, I would like to know what you thought of it. I’ve heard that TPW was the better book of the trilogy but I don’t want to end it because it felt so unfinished and I don’t want to leave it that way.
Edit: Grammar
by Deep-thinker881