Kingdom of Ash Book Review

Kingdom of Ash by Sarah J Maas

PLEASE NOTE: THIS REVIEW DOES NOT CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR KOA, BUT DOES CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR THE OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES, INCLUDING TOWER OF DAWN.

From Goodreads: Aelin has risked everything to save her people―but at a tremendous cost. Locked within an iron coffin by the Queen of the Fae, Aelin must draw upon her fiery will as she endures months of torture. Aware that yielding to Maeve will doom those she loves keeps her from breaking, though her resolve begins to unravel with each passing day…

With Aelin captured, Aedion and Lysandra remain the last line of defense to protect Terrasen from utter destruction. Yet they soon realize that the many allies they’ve gathered to battle Erawan’s hordes might not be enough to save them. Scattered across the continent and racing against time, Chaol, Manon, and Dorian are forced to forge their own paths to meet their fates. Hanging in the balance is any hope of salvation―and a better world.

And across the sea, his companions unwavering beside him, Rowan hunts to find his captured wife and queen―before she is lost to him forever.

As the threads of fate weave together at last, all must fight, if they are to have a chance at a future. Some bonds will grow even deeper, while others will be severed forever in the explosive final chapter of the Throne of Glass series.

Well, this took a considerable effort to get through. I’m not entirely sure why, either. I rather enjoyed reading the final instalment of the series, and I [like many others] raced to buy it on the day of release. And then… I read about two pages. and put it down. And so it continued for about a week. After that I picked up some pace, but it still took me almost two weeks to read, and I haven’t worked out if its the writing style or if it was that I was trying to savour it.

That being said, I am pleased to have read the final book in the series, and I understand why so many people loved it, but it didn’t quite live up to expectations for me. Don’t get me wrong, I really liked the book, and I am going to talk in detail about what I enjoyed. The characters are riveting, the dialogue is very easy to follow, and the descriptions are gorgeous while the emotions are so gloriously raw. But there was just something lacking in it too.

Aelin’s chapters were very deep and developed, and I found myself keen to get back to them whenever the story took us away from her. She goes through a LOT in this book, and sometimes that can get kind of uncomfortable [there should probably be some trigger warnings in there somewhere, but the synopsis does briefly touch upon it] but I feel like a lot of the importance is put on how she develops as a character throughout this book. Similarly, I found myself really immersed in Manon’s chapters for the same reasons. Compared to the last few books, she goes through so many events and changes in this last book that it was just so interesting to see unfold. Naturally, I did enjoy all the sass in this book, which was very packed full of sarcasm and wit, and the dialogue between all the characters, especially when these two were in scenes, was natural and sometimes hilarious.

And then there’s the descriptions. God, the descriptions. I know some people criticise Maas for overwrought emotions and descriptions, but when she’s on it, she really is on it and she delivers some glorious lines that simply glow in the book. There are some scenes that just took my breath away, and I loved them so much. I’m definitely a fan of the angst and the drama in this book.

That being said, as I have already noted, the book is not perfect, and there were some elements in it that I really didn’t enjoy. While I liked the sass of the characters, sometimes I struggled with them all kinda bleeding into each other. The males were all very sarcastic and powerful and so very magical and overprotective and handsome, and the female characters all seemed like badass goddesses with a good dash of darkness and a lot of sass, simmering beauty and powerful magic. It got a bit irritating in the last few books, but there just seems to be so many characters stacking up at this point, which is also problematic. I can’t even remember how many main characters there are in this series at this point, and I definitely can’t remember all the names and things, so there were some chapters where I pretty much just lost interest because I couldn’t follow, and I wasn’t willing to re-read everything in order to figure it out. Mix this in with place names and other worldbuilding words and I quickly got confused and a little annoyed. In all reality, it suffered a bit from what I consider GRRM-Syndrome, where there are a few too many characters and perspectives and things going on, and for me a lot of chapters in KoA were a bit like reading Bran chapters, while Aelin’s and Manon’s were like reading Tyrion chapters. I didn’t care about the other voices enough to want to read 20 pages from their POV after a while. I wanted to just get back to the main show. And while I can see why the plot demands different POVs, it was a bit lengthy for me.

Furthermore, the battle scenes were…meh. I won’t go too much into them because spoilers, but there were so many things that just drained me during them. A lot of them are very same-y, with descriptions and lines borrowed from other battle scenes throughout the book. Furthermore, the strategies and general plot of the battles always seems to go the same way, almost as though there was little research going into these scenes. I get that large-scale battles can be some of the hardest scenes to write, and they are so easy to get wrong, but I also struggled with SJM’s battles in ACOWAR, and this hasn’t improved on them either. I got bored of the same descriptions, the same plot for these scenes, and the other general [spoilery so keeping it hush] things that made the battle scenes very unrealistic. To me, this led to an ending that I kinda enjoyed but also thought was a bit anticlimatic for the most part.

Overall, I’m giving Kingdom of Ash an 8/10 stars. I did enjoy reading this behemoth [honestly, it clocks it at near 1000 pages] and I do understand why people were so hyped about it, but for me it just wasn’t Maas’ best novel. The characters blurred together a lot for me, and suffered from too many voices and perspectives. Plus the battle scenes were not the best, and they bothered me after a while. However, I loved the descriptions and some of the scenes and all the romance angst packed into this book.

Has anyone else read this book or plans to? What did you all think of it? Feel free to leave your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below <3