I am back with another book review, Muse of Nightmares by Laini Taylor.
The story picks up pretty much right where the first book ended, with the addition of some new characters which will be integrated into the story a little bit later. We have Lazlo and Sarai and the rest of the godspawn gang. I don't really want to say too much about the plot because I think that there's a lot of inter-connected pieces and I don't want to spoil anything.
The writing itself was Taylor's usual style, very lyrical and descriptive. I honestly cannot fault this book for that. But the story itself just felt like I went on for so long! This book clocks in at just over 500 pages and I think a lot of that could have been cut down.
There were a number of times when I was reading this book and felt like, while it was good, I didn't really feel like it was advancing my knowledge of the world or the characters. Towards the end, when the new characters combine with the original ones, I felt like we got bombarded with a whole bunch of new information that would have been better introduced earlier, especially since I believe this is a duology, not a trilogy.
It didn't really hit me until I was about 2/3 of the way through that while the initial incident from the end of the first book was largely resolved, there wasn't much else happening in the book. I would have been fine with the ending of book one (aside from the cliff-hanger-type ending) but after the first quarter of the book, most of that aspect was cleared up. Afterwards, there was a whole new situation that was interesting, but not to the point where I was really invested in reading more of the story. In the end, I did end up finishing the book because, by that point, I was already too far in to quit.
Overall, I am glad to see loose ends tied up but I felt like most of it could have been condensed down into an extended epilogue or even a novella after book one.
The writing itself was Taylor's usual style, very lyrical and descriptive. I honestly cannot fault this book for that. But the story itself just felt like I went on for so long! This book clocks in at just over 500 pages and I think a lot of that could have been cut down.
There were a number of times when I was reading this book and felt like, while it was good, I didn't really feel like it was advancing my knowledge of the world or the characters. Towards the end, when the new characters combine with the original ones, I felt like we got bombarded with a whole bunch of new information that would have been better introduced earlier, especially since I believe this is a duology, not a trilogy.
It didn't really hit me until I was about 2/3 of the way through that while the initial incident from the end of the first book was largely resolved, there wasn't much else happening in the book. I would have been fine with the ending of book one (aside from the cliff-hanger-type ending) but after the first quarter of the book, most of that aspect was cleared up. Afterwards, there was a whole new situation that was interesting, but not to the point where I was really invested in reading more of the story. In the end, I did end up finishing the book because, by that point, I was already too far in to quit.
Overall, I am glad to see loose ends tied up but I felt like most of it could have been condensed down into an extended epilogue or even a novella after book one.