I’ve been re-reading some of Katherine Arden’s books in preparation for The Warm Hands of Ghosts, which I’m very excited for. The Bear and the Nightingale went fine. Went well, actually. I enjoyed it as much this time as did when I first read it over two years ago.
But The Girl in the Tower…Yeah, I still don’t like it. The plot isn’t very engaging. It’s politics, but very weak politics — as in, things are happening, but you don’t really care about the things that are happening, and even if you did, you’d still question why the politics feel so kindergarten level; >!would make sense if it had been revealed that Kasyan had cast a spell of idiocy on everyone, but that never happened!<. The atmospheric worldbuilding felt like it had been discarded to reuse phrases and locations and even interactions (not in words, but in spirit; a lot of the interactions have the same flavour as the ones from the first book, and even as the ones from earlier in this book). But the most egregious misstep is the character work. Vasya is improved by becoming an absolute cretin. An inspired choice, really. Or it would be if the consequences of this lack of brain activity were explored in this book, rather than the last in the trilogy, The Winter of the Witch. But if you read this book in a vacuum, all you have is Vasya being reckless, her making a mistake, getting into trouble for it, and that’s it — no character consequence, no character growth. She just feels guilty for a bit, before blundering her way into another wrong choice.
This was my kind of sort of review.
by HotMudCoffee