Original Empire of Storms Review

My original review of Empire of Storms was not glowing. My love for the first three books was the fuel that got me through Queen of Shadows, but by the time I arrived at the first page of the over 600 page tome that was Empire of Storms, Sarah J. Maas had lost a lot of her luster.

My second time through this book opened my eyes even more. Characters are completely abandoning their behaviors to pair up. Aelin and Rowan, Lysandra and Aedion, Dorian and Manon – everybody is ready to fuck and it is just the worst. Of all the moments I think the worst was when, after transforming into an ancient sea dragon and devastating an entire Valg fleet along with its sea wyverns, Lysandra is lying on the beach, still in dragon form, basically bleeding out, when Aedion blurts out “You can’t die because I am going to marry you!” and I had to put the book down and go do something else.

The sad thing is that even in the midst of all the love stories, the skeleton of the fantasy epic is still there. They have two Wyrdkeys, they have been sent to retrieve a lock that will seal the keys and Erawan behind the Wyrdgates forever, and Aelin is working to create an army to prove that she can defend Terrasen, defeat Erawan, and earn back her throne. The story could have been this with no love stories and it would have been an amazing journey. If these characters had all been friends, members of Aelin’s court, working together for a better tomorrow, I think I would have loved this book. But, as many, many Goodreads reviewers have noted, once Maas started writing A Court of Thorns and Roses it infected everything else with its sex, word repetition, and purring – drowning out any other excellence that might have existed.

Reading a Maas novel from this period is painful. It makes you wonder what happened, and I even mentioned in my second reading review of Queen of Shadows that something must have happened to cause this complete 180 degree turn away from the books that were so amazing. I’m looking down the barrel of Tower of Dawn right now – the only remaining book between me and Kingdom of Ash. I do want to see how this series ends, but all I see is a 600 page, never-ending story that just works to get Chaol and the magic nurse to fuck so we can have one more pairing to keep track of. CHARACTERS DON’T HAVE TO BE IN LOVE OR DICKING EACH OTHER FOR US TO CARE OR BE INVESTED IN THEM. Ugh.

Not to mention that Tower of Dawn is just a book that is meant to cram in all kinds of exposition to explain who Maeve really is and what happened in the past and why so Maas can set up the ending she wants instead of the ending that has been set up over the course of FIVE FUCKING BOOKS. Tower of Dawn is the book she had to write so we could all get on the same page because she spent so much time on love stories instead of slowly showing us clues and giving us info about the world that this story set in so we feel invested. Instead we have to sit through a 600 page lecture about history. Buckle up, buckaroos.

On to the next one.