Hamad's Reviews > Kingdom of Ash

This review and other non-spoilery reviews can be found @The Book Prescription

“Once upon a time, in a land long since burned to ash, there lived a young princess who loved her kingdom …

🌟 You may like Sarah J. Maas writing, you may hate it. Actually SJM may be the most controversial author at the current time. So we may agree to disagree on her style but I think something that we can not deny is her immense success and how big this series has got. In my 3 years on GR and few month of blogging, I have never seen a book that took over those sites as this book did.

🌟 I remember finishing 2016 with starting Throne of Glass which was a great gift from a friend. I wanted to end 2016 and start 2017 with a bang and reflecting back On this, I don’t regret it.

🌟 Keep in mind that I am also not a SJM stan, I just appreciate a good book and this series had its ups and downs but I am so glad it had a good ending. I am also not one of those people who started the series when book 1 was released. I actually read the whole series in 1 year.

🌟 I don’t usually include all the previous books ratings in a review but I am adding it here this time to prove a point:

Throne of Glass ★★★★
Crown of Midnight ★★★★★
Heir of Fire ★★★
Queen of shadows ★★★
Empire of storms ★★★★
Tower of Dawn ★★★

🌟 I am actually thankful for Sarah for entertaining us with

7 books
532 Chapters
4464 Pages

🌟We haven’t actually gone into the review yet so let’s get down to it:

🌟 The world building was great, I love this world, I love the magic, the different creatures and the politics were amazing too. I like that this is a hard magic system that is bound by rules and that it is not just random and chaotic. I also know Erilea’s map by heart and I didn’t have to go back to the map at a certain point to check what was happening because it was all right in my mind.

🌟 I always used to say that Shatter me series has one of the best character development in books! Sadly that was shattered in restore me

🌟 Now I am going to say that this is one of the series that I love the characters of. How they started and what they ended up being. In my previous reviews I criticized how Sarah always uses the term beautiful and most beautiful and gorgeous…etc to describe her characters. There are many many characters in this series and UNFORTUNATELY they are all beautiful! And she even went to say that a character could only be described as beautiful and I was like: “It can be described by many things but you don’t want to brain storm even a little bit”.

🌟 That being said, I love Aelin & Rowan, Aedion & Lysandra (my favs), Chaol & Yrene, Elide & Lorcan, Dorian and Manon, Asterin and the Thirteen, I even like Abraxos!

🌟 I think Sarah can write the best ships ever, I always feel the chemistry between those characters and some of them started differently and I thought that they were not a good match until they really weren’t!

🌟 There are some series that you read and forget the characters after a few books and there are some characters that are meant to stay with you, affect you and change you and obviously this is the later choice! I can’t stop thinking about the sass, the retorts and comebacks of some characters. You can’t believe how scared I was while reading this book, because there was going to be a major war and I was worried about my babies! I didn’t know who was going to survive and who wouldn’t and that’s just war! I am not sure if I am totally satisfied with how things go but I can see why Sarah did certain things that way!

“Aelin wiped her hands. “Well, that’s over and done with,” she announced, and strode to the desk and map. “Shall we discuss where you all plan to march once we beat the living shit out of this army?”

🌟 Regarding Manon by the way, she was not described differently in this book and that was a bit better than expected.

🌟 Now the writing was good, the references and planning since book 1 is just mind blowing. There were some good quotes (Captain Obvious strikes again, It is almost 1000 pages so it is bound to have some good quotes). Sometimes though, I felt that Sarah was like a toddler who learnt a new word and was saying it all the time to everyone and this word is Sarah’s renowned “Mate”. If you notice it once, it can not be unnoticed and becomes very annoying specially that it is repeated more than a 100 times!!

🌟 The plot at the end of book 5 peaked and left us wondering about many things making this one of my most anticipated reads of the year! The plot was interesting from the first till the last page! I complained about how Sarah’s books were bigger than needed and yet I felt that I need MORE this time! I don’t know how I read 1000 pages in 5 days.

🌟 I like (I certainly like a lot of things) that each small group of characters were having their own adventure and their own goals and they all converge to make the bigger plot at the last pages! That was better than a linear way of telling the story. And that there were not ex machina moments in this book, everything made sense and the foreshadowing was top-notch! I feel like reading the series again just to catch all the hidden clues and be mesmerized again. Did I mention that the series was first written when Sarah was 16?!!! I am currently writing a short story and it is so hard but to start writing a whole series at 16 is just mind-blowing.

🌟 I can’t deny that there are problems with the series and I know that SJM is just great at writing white characters, I don’t know why she’s trying to ruin her books with false half-cooked diversity that brought more problems than benefits to her. I am one of those readers who are convinced that no diversity is better than bad and forces diversity. But one thing I can not understand too is how there are people who hate the series and yet they read the 7 books, isn’t that a bit hard to understand?

🌟 Summary: I usually rate books according to the elements of the story and how they come out together and how well they were written. And although I don’t deny the problems in this book, I think it is amazing that a book caught my attention for a 1000 pages. I am rating this one on both my analysis of the story and out of pure enjoyment.

🌟 I can’t believe that this is coming to an end! Sarah J Maas, here are 5 stars and Thanks a lot!! To a better world!