Title: Glass Sword (Red Queen #2)
Author: Victoria Aveyard
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy
Age Group: Young Adult
Rating: 2 stars
Purchase: Amazon
If there’s one thing Mare Barrow knows, it’s that she’s different.
Mare Barrow’s blood is red—the color of common folk—but her Silver ability, the power to control lightning, has turned her into a weapon that the royal court tries to control.
The crown calls her an impossibility, a fake, but as she makes her escape from Maven, the prince—the friend—who betrayed her, Mare uncovers something startling: she is not the only one of her kind.
Pursued by Maven, now a vindictive king, Mare sets out to find and recruit other Red-and-Silver fighters to join in the struggle against her oppressors.
But Mare finds herself on a deadly path, at risk of becoming exactly the kind of monster she is trying to defeat.
Will she shatter under the weight of the lives that are the cost of rebellion? Or have treachery and betrayal hardened her forever?
The electrifying next installment in the Red Queen series escalates the struggle between the growing rebel army and the blood-segregated world they’ve always known—and pits Mare against the darkness that has grown in her soul.
All right, before I begin reviewing Glass Sword, let me start by saying that I loved Red Queen. I even gave it 5 stars in my review. I was entranced by the world building, a smart mix of scifi/dystopian and epic fantasy, I loved Mare, I adored Maven, even if he turned out to be of the not-so-good-guy variety, and I liked Cal. Needless to say, I was thrilled when the sequel was released, and I purchased a copy almost right away.
And then, Glass Sword turned out to be the biggest dissapointment of the year. Maybe of several years, if I’m being honest.
The book lacks just about everything. All the elements that made Red Queen an engaging, spellbinding book, are now gone. It’s like the author stopped pouring effort into it, and just wrote down word after word without meaning.
Glass Sword has tons of action scenes, but they’re so dull, I skimmed through several pages just to get through them. Maybe they’d look good on the big screen, but ten pages of action scenes in this book just didn’t work for me. This was partly because I couldn’t relate to the characters anymore.
Mare was amazing in book one. I loved her. Now? She’s cold, arrogant, very repetitive, and pretty much thinks she’s the most special cookie in the bunch. She mentions she’s this dangerous weapon and people should be afraid of her….oh, just about once every page. She’s growing very dark in this book, but it doesn’t make much sense the way she does it. She doesn’t question the things she should be questioning, she doesn’t trust anyone anymore, and she barely feels a connection to her family, although they should be most important to her.
The whole recruitment process of Silver/Reds (people with Red blood, Silver abilities, like Mare) is dull and boring, and for a large part it’s because none of the characters are even remotely interesting. No one is interesting. They’re all bland, boring, and I skipped more paragraphs than I read, by the time I got to the end of the book. It was all so predictable too. I could pretty much guess what would happen about one hundred pages before it actually happened.
The book’s major problems are: lack of connection to the characters, lack of likeable characters, and repetition. I’ve never seen a book that repeats itself this often. Mare’s narrative has gone from interesting to so dull you could fall asleep. The story also never moves forward. Sure, they recruit some Newbloods, as they dub the Reds with Silver abilities, but that doesn’t really bring the story forward. It’s only until the end when the story moves forward a little – a little, I say.
Mare acts like a Mary Sue. She’s a super special cookie and deserves special treatment. It’s not troublesome that she is – she is the Lightning Girl, after all, and like Katniss in the Hunger Games series that makes her a symbol of a revolution -but it’s troublesome that she’s so convinced of this, and keeps repeating it! It makes her come across as extremely arrogant. I wanted Maven to come and just kill her more than once throughout the book.
The only somewhat redeemable character left by the end of the book is Kilorn. I still sort of like him. The others are so bland and boring they could’ve been replaced by stick figures.
Oh, and Maven. At least he stands out from the crowd by being wicked.
I’m utterly dissapointed in this book, and how it differed from Red Queen, both in writing style, character’s narrative and strengths, and lack of romance. I’m not sure if I’ll ever pick up the third book. Maybe, since it features Maven.
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