Jessica

Very action packed from multiple pov's. Battles are described amazingly and I really was not able to guess the ending. I started to like the characters even more and when I read the last word; I had cried, laughed and be utterly amazed. But most of all, I closed the book with the greatest sense of homesickness I ever had.

It took me an extraordinary long time to finish this book, part due to it being an audiobook (which I found out I have a hard time following), and part due to how much I didn't really care. This was definitely not one of those books that I couldn't wait to pick up again. And so I didn't. I spend months not thinking about the book, only really “reading” it when it was more convenient to listen to an audiobook than read. Like in the bath or in bed.

When they casted Holland's body into Black London with the dangerous black stone, they all thought him dead. But death doesn't mean much to Osaron, he is a god and a king. And a king needs a kingdom. And here it was, someone that could take him out of this god-forsaken place and to a new world. A living world. And so he made a deal. A body for a dying world brought back to life. And so White London flourished, with Holland as its king. But White London wasn't good enough for Osaron, he needed more power, more magic. And when Kell came along, he knew where to find it.

Characters

This story has a lot of viewpoint; Kell, Lila, Rhy & Alucard being the most common. But also Holland, Osaron, Ned & a few one-time-only characters you will never hear from again. It's a lot, too much for me at least. It feels like Schwab found it very important that everything was told through someone's eyes instead of second-hand information to the main characters. Some of the information is never known by the main characters. And because of all of these viewpoints, many characters felt flat. The main characters and Holland didn't have this problem as much luckily, since they were long established over the other two books (except for Alucard who makes his entrance in the previous book, but still feels well-rounded), but Osaron was just such a bad villain. I understand he is just a piece of magic only knowing boundless hunger, but he could have had some sort of a personality. He could at least have had some plan.

Story & Outline

Pacing

Oh boy, does this book start slow. I takes the book a long time to set up the event. I'm used to the last book of a series being a bit faster paced due to the set up that is being done in the previous books, but then again this series has been a bit loose with its overarching storyline. The middle part feels very disconnected and has a completely different vibe.

tl;dr

This book's story was a bit weird and sometimes hard to follow. The pacing was all over the place and the extensive amount of viewpoints made it hard to get into it. But at least half the book was not filler, like the previous one, but still had a lot of fluff I didn't care for. A lot of the things that driven the plot were complete luck and made it hard to anticipate the ending, which left me quite unsatisfied.

The stories were interesting, but dreadfully long with loads of unnecessary details. It's interesting to see how much the writing craft has changed through the years.

I really really liked this book. The characters felt well-rounded and it had a lot of different kinds of action and sensation. Personally, the long paragraphs of explanations on how the cathedral was built bored me to death, so I sped read those. I will certainly pick up part 2.

“A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge”

I think I just found myself a new favorite book! All of the characters were so fleshed out with amazing details and quirks. The end made me cry several times. I still remember a lot of details about a lot of characters, something I was scared of I would miss. Normally I don't like it when a book has a big cast, because I get confused and there are too many details to remember. I literally had zero problem with that in this story. I loved how I could see a conflict from multiple viewpoints actually.

The book does start very slow and I did have to push myself through the beginning since it felt like I was only reading introduction after introduction. That becomes eases after the first 7 chapters and even then each chapter had some things that were mentioned about the chapter before, which made it a lot less tedious and moved the story forward. Most of the action is still at the end and the biggest part of the story is building up to that action . This might make you wonder why I still gave it 5 stars however and that's because I honestly didn't mind all of it, the writing style is so flowing that even the most boring looking scenes are detailed and keep you sucked into the world.

I can't wait to pick up the next book!