June Book Reviews (Throne of Glass!)

Hi loves,

More book reviews!! Here’s what I’ve read so far in June…

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Flux – Orion Carloto
3/5 Stars
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You may have seen this from my book haul I posted a few weeks ago, and it didn’t take me long to read it! I’ve followed Orion ever since she first started out on the internet and well, I think I am perpetually in love with her. My favourite poems in this book are ‘A confession’ and ‘Flux’, which is ironic because they come one after the other. I wanted to buy this for the longest time but always thought it was a little too expensive, when it went down in price I snapped it up straight away and I wasn’t disappointed. This is a really beautiful collection of poetry and my favourite book cover ever. If I was to release a book / poetry collection, the cover would be something like this. It’s gorgeous.

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Moon Women – Pamela Duncan
3/5 Stars
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Now, as we all know, your girl over here is obsessed with the moon and uh…feminism. So when I was in a book store and saw this on the shelf, I instantly bought it, I had no idea what it was going to be about but knew I was going to enjoy it anyway and I really did. This is a book aimed at older women I’d say – I feel like you have to be of an older age to enjoy it otherwise you’d read it and think it was boring. It’s one of those books that doesn’t really have a plot or a beginning, middle and end, there’s no big climax etc. it’s just a period of time transformed into a novel, but I really like those. I really enjoyed it and it’s all about strong, independent women of colour, so if that’s your thing I’d definitely urge you to pick it up! It’s quite a hefty read though and definitely not something you can get through all at once, but nonetheless, I really liked it.

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Throne of Glass – Sarah J. Maas
4/5 Stars
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And finally, the one we’ve all been waiting for. (This was also in my recent book haul). I bought Throne of Glass because I’m extremely late to the party and haven’t read any of the fantasy series from authors like Sarah J. Maas, Cassandra Clare, Veronica Roth etc. and so thought I needed to make a start. Obviously, there were huge expectations for this book because it’s so popular and I was actually quite impressed with it, I found myself wanting to hurry up and finish whatever I was doing so I could quickly pick up the book again and continue reading. It was a really quick and easy read, I think I finished it in about a day and a half. I also really liked the fact each chapter was so short because it made for quick reading and I definitely preferred that style as oppose to long, lengthy chapters.

I was also super impressed with the fact Maas wrote this when she was 16. I could go into all of the cliche things that occurred in this book and rip her to shreds for it but, I’m quite partial to them myself and don’t normally hate them unless I find them problematic, and in this book I didn’t find them problematic therefore it didn’t bother me. Plus, like I said, she wrote this when she was 16 – you have to give her credit for doing such a good job.

However…

Things I wasn’t so keen on…

1). The fact Celaena mentioned in every other sentence how much she wanted to crack somebody’s skull open or rip their eyes out or stab them through the heart. We get it, you’re the best assassin to ever exist in the history of forever, shut up about it. We didn’t even get to see any evidence of her actually possessing any skills of being an assassin until over halfway through the book when she beats Verin in one of the tests by defeating him in 0.2 seconds.  Before this, she was just a girl with an unusually angry thought process and I admit, it was beginning to annoy me after a while.

2). Ties in with point 1 but we’re reminded every 2 seconds about how deathly dangerous Celaena is yet she seems to posses no skill of actually being an assassin – it was all talk and no action. Constant internal monologue about how she wants to slit people’s throats and the fact she could throw men 10x the size of her over a balcony and crack their skulls open if she wanted to even though she’s extremely petite anyway as well as being extremely underweight from being a slave for the past year of her life. She doesn’t seem to have the eye of an assassin as people manage to creep up on her all the time as well as walk in and out of her room unnoticed, not to mention the amount of times she woke up with one of her potential love interests standing in the doorway of her room or at the end of her bed whilst she slept. That doesn’t sound like the most skilled and dangerous assassin that ever lived to me.

3). Even though this book is inspired by Cinderella (yes, I’m just as confused as you are) all I could think about when reading this was Hunger Games Hunger Games Hunger Games… it seemed to take a lot of plot ideas from the Hunger Games, it was essentially the same but with a royal twist, if you like. The Hunger Games came out in 2008 and Throne of Glass in 2012, so there’s a great possibility Maas could have been inspired by it and I’m sure other readers have picked up on it too (I haven’t read enough reviews to find out yet).

4). Like I mentioned earlier, there were a lot of cliches in this book and I was generally unbothered by them however, as the book went on I was beginning to get a little fed up with the predicability of it all. Celaena is of course the most beautiful girl to ever walk the Earth as well as being the most dangerous assassin in all the land and of course every important character in the book falls in love with her and proceeds to compete for her affection…in the end I was beginning to resent Celaena for it, even though it’s all completely fictional. It was like, everyone loved her because she was perfect and good at everything so I was like yeah alright Celaena I don’t even wanna read about you anymore because I’m jealous.

5). I’ve heard some people describing this book as a feminist novel and even though the synopsis suggests the idea of an intelligent, badass assassin who takes shit from nobody and can never be captured…not quite the case. I think all of the cliches in this book completely overshadowed any trace of feminist writing that could have happened, which I was a little bummed about. It started off promising but of course, appearance and men and romance and relationships then became seemingly more important to the plot meaning the independent woman side of it was forgotten about.

6). This isn’t necessarily an issue with the book but more of a personal issue I have – the names of all the different lands etc. confused me at times as on a couple of occasions I found myself having to reread parts because I couldn’t understand the context through not being able to remember who came from where or which land was good and which land was bad because they both had names that sounded the same and yada yada, that’s just an issue I have in general though and not specific to Throne of Glass (hello We Were Liars review), so I’m not really classing this as a real point.

In terms of the love triangle as well, my favourite was Chaol (I feel like I’m going to get asked this so I’m putting it here). If you’ve read the book, who do you prefer??

Despite mentioning all of those points above, that’s just me being picky and giving a more in depth review of the book as I know a lot of you have read it and if you haven’t yet, I’d definitely recommend giving it a try. Also, I am 20 years old and had I read this book when it originally came out in 2012 (and I was 14) I would have probably fallen absolutely in love with it, because younger teens are probably the target audience for this (hello Twilight review). I think for a YA read there’s only so much you can expect – like I said the focus is more on the love interests / love triangles etc. more than anything, if you’re looking for an actual assassin book as such, there are many adult options out there, so for it being YA, I think Maas overall did a nice job and I certainly did enjoy reading it, I know I’ll be continuing on with the series to see where it goes.

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If you’ve read Throne of Glass (or any of the other books I’ve mentioned) let me know what you think !! I always love to have discussions in the comments on book posts!

All my love,

Chloe .xx

Goodreads – ChloLuna

p.s. – what should I read next – The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas or Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn?