2 Stars
Cover 5 Stars

WWTQ: How to make Throne of Glass unfun.

Answer: This. This book is how to make it unfun.

I'm hiding most of this because of spoilers. The Jasad Heir is a boring version of Throne of Glass with lots of middle eastern food references and lots of history lessons.

The pacing and the world-building are all over the place, and it took up so much space, leaving the character development wanting. This was just a slog to get through, but I did get through it, so that's why it's getting bumped up a star. It is compelling enough, I guess, but ultimately, it's not for me.

Because the book spends so much time on history, we don't get a ton of character development. I think the intention was to feed us Sylvia's (the FMC) back story in drips and drabs, but it was a lot of repetition.

Sylvia isn't spunky or clever. She's a terrible person. She kills people to "survive" all the time, but really only feels bad about it if they're Jasadi, like her. She also considers herself a compassionate and kind person, which I found laughable. She's neither of those things, and apparently, nor is she self-aware.

Sylvia is the lost queen of a destroyed nation, Jasad. I thought her unwavering loyalty to her homeland strange. It teeters on obsession. It's all very Jacobian. She was displaced at ten, and despite what the book tells us, she really couldn't have been that consumed by State affairs as a child. Like, come on. I don't believe a child could be fluent in half dozen contemporary and ancient languages, or that she understood state politics of all her rival nations as well as her own, or that she had an understanding of the complex socio-economic structure of her country. She was 10. And now, at 20 she doesn't do anything that suggests she was some sort of prodigy or scholar. We're told she's a survivor which is a different skillset entirely. One that was cultivated by a now dead sadistic mentor who lives in her head. (The internal voice of her sadist mentor giving her survival tips throughout the novel was so distracting. I really did not like that at all.)

There are also a lot of things that don't make sense.

The cuffs for one. She has these invisible magic-dampening bracelets that she wears for reasons that aren't revealed. They keep her magic, maybe 25% of the reason she's hunted (the other being her race), hidden. Sometimes. Other times it leaps out but it's erratic and she can't control it. Sometimes she can control it. Like she can stop time by snapping her fingers at will. Then at some point, because it's convenient, they just fall off. Cool. Cool.

Arin, the love interest is allergic to magic. Again, sometimes. By the time they've admitted to their attraction he's immune, I guess? This one made even less sense than the fritzy bangles but OK, I'll suspend my belief, again.

Where I finally gave up was about 65% in, we find out Sylvia has selective amnesia. I hate the amnesia trope. It's so convenient and contrived. That at this point she's fed us at least two hundred pages of history about her country and growing up (to 10) there, and we learn that she's an observant but unreliable narrator with a revisionist history just made me want to throw the book.

So I skimmed the rest. The ending was predictable. Everything you expect to happen does.

I will not be reading book two.

The Jasad Heir - Likewise Book Reviews

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