AUGUST WRAP UP: What I Read This Month

Hi everyone! Welcome to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today, I’ll be talking about the books I read in August. Sorry that it’s taken me this long to post. This month I read 3 books. Spoiler Alert: These reviews have spoilers. Here are my thoughts about them: 

1. YA FANTASY AND ROMANCE: A Reaper At The Gates by Sabaa Tahir

This is the third book of the Ember Quartet by this author. Each title of the series refers to one of the story’s main characters: Laia, Elias, and Helene. The first referred to Laia, the second to Helene, and this third installment to Elias. Originally published in 2018, this book was a re-read for me. I read it the first time when it came out seven years ago, and again last month. I liked it a lot that first time but, frankly, I didn’t like it this second time. Here’s why:

I have had a hit-and-miss relationship with this series. Before, I DNF’d it after this third book because I did not like its female protagonist. I should’ve DNF’d it before that, but I continued because I liked Elias. That changed though. In this book, he is insufferable. He is stuck in a non-ending Hamlet-esque dilemma of to be or not to be the Soul Catcher, and that is ultimately detrimental to his character development. By the end of the book, he is still in the same place he was at the beginning. I get that the Waiting Place is important for the overall plot of the series, but I don’t understand why the author chose to keep Elias in this predicament for so long. To extend the angst between him and Laia? To keep the Waiting Place and the dead in the story? I’m guessing the first, but whatever the reason, it went on for too long. I felt like the author didn’t know what to do with Elias after he becomes the Soul Catcher and the telling of his inner battles and turmoil was poorly executed.

Secondly, in this book there is a significant change from the Nightbringer and the Commandant to Grimarr and the Karkauns. Helene spends way too much time fighting the fights Keris Veturia wants her to fight, a.k.a., chasing Elias and Laia in the second book and then fighting Grimarr and his Karkauns in the third, so she can do other things off-page and declare herself Empress at the end. We never actually get to see these two face each other. If the Nightbringer was Laia’s enemy, the Commandant was Helene and Elias’s. But, in this book, we are introduced to a third villain that, in my opinion, came out of nowhere. And a good chunk of this installment is spent trying to defeat him.

Finally, I regret to say, this book is forgettable.

2. YA FANTASY AND ROMANCE: A Sky Beyond The Storm by Sabaa Tahir

This is the fourth and final book of the Ember Quartet by Sabaa Tahir. In this book, Helene is still trying to defeat Grimarr and Elias is still playing Hamlet. Ugh. Laia, for her part, is trying to steal the Nightbringer’s scythe, to change the Soul Catcher back into Elias (unsuccessfully) and to figure out if she can trust Rehmat, the Nightbringer’s (ex-)wife and magical counterpart. Rehmat is another character that shows up out of nowhere (and very late into the story no less) and her introduction into the story is absurd. Yes, there were some inklings before, like when Laia’s physical description mentions her golden eyes, but still. It was a bit unbelievable.

I had some issues with this last book of the series. First, it was a long book and not much happened for most of it. The characters are all stuck in the same place they left off at the end of the third book and remain so for the first three quarters of the fourth. Second, some characters deserved better. Darin, Helene, and Avitas among them. Darin dies, Helene loses everything, including her sister Livia and the love of her life, in order to become Empress (not a worthwhile exchange in my opinion), and, finally, Avitas, who dies protecting Helene, yes, but whose death, in my opinion, only happened so Helene could be paired with Musa Adisa later on. And this is a huge disservice to Avitas Harper. Ugh.

Finally, I did not like the ending of the book and series. Frankly, I felt cheated. After all this time and everything that Keris Veturia does to Helene, it is not Helene who kills the Commandant. It is Cook, who shows up out of nowhere (again). The author loves to do this, I’m noticing. I understand that Keris and Cook have their own history, but we, as readers, aren’t shown any of it. We are shown, instead, what Helene suffers because of Keris’s machinations and, in our minds, it is Helene who is supposed to kill Keris. Or Elias, whose storyline should’ve ended with a confrontation between him and his mother. If Cook was the one who was going to kill her all along, why not show us what Cook went through so we could sympathize with her instead?

The final battle between Laia and the Nightbringer was rather dull and lackluster. Disappointing. And Laia never grows up. By the end of this book, she’s 20 years old maybe? But she was still just as annoying as she was in the first book. Finally, Elias. The end of his tenure as Soul Catcher happens in the next to last chapter of the book, and frankly, it should’ve happened sooner. By the time this happens, we, as readers, are both extremely exhausted and bored with this storyline.

I Will Not Read This Series Again.

3. HISTORICAL FICTION AND MYTHOLOGY: The Women of Troy by Pat Barker

This is the second installment of The Women of Troy series by Pat Barker. In this book, Troy has already fallen and the Greeks are eager to return home with the spoils of war, including the women of Troy themselves. They await a favorable wind for the Aegean to set sail, yet it does not come. Why? Because the gods are offended. The body of King Priam lies unburied and desecrated. And the Greeks, camped in the shadows of the city they destroyed, cannot go home. Hence, with nothing to do, old feuds resurface and new suspicions and rivalries begin to fester.

I liked this book, but I do think that the title of this book and series are misleading. This series is marketed as a retelling of The Iliad and consequent fall of Troy that focuses on giving a voice to the women of Troy. This is not true. The Silence of the Girls, the first book in the series, is a retelling of The Iliad; the narrator is Briseis, the former queen of Lyrnessus, a neighboring city-state and ally of Troy. After Achilles kills her husband and brothers, Briseis and the other women of the palace are captured and given to the kings of Greece as prizes of war. Now she is a slave and soon becomes Achilles’s war prize. Like I said in my review for this book in my previous wrap up, the first part of The Silence of the Girls is very well done. However, when the author introduces Achilles as a point-of-character in the second part, he supplants Briseis and he is the main character of the novel now. If the purpose of the story is to highlight how women suffer during war and its aftermath; to describe what they have to endure because of the power men have over them, adding Achilles as a main character deters from this.

In The Women of Troy, we’re introduced to Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, Helen and all the other women of Priam’s palace and court but the main storyline is still centered on the men. Specifically, on Pyrrhus and his refusal to bury Priam. In fact, the book itself starts with Pyrrhus’s point-of-view. The story about the life of the women before the fall of Troy and in the camp after the city is destroyed is pushed to the background. And Briseis, now a free woman and the wife of Alcimus, does interact with them but she isn’t very nice to them, particularly Amina. Her main concern throughout the entire book is to not disobey Pyrrhus.

In short, I liked this book but I don’t think that it gives a voice to the women of Troy. I also noticed that the main storyline is heavily influenced by Euripides’s and Sophocles’s tragedies. This isn’t a bad thing. But I still think that we are told (by the way this book was marketed) to expect something that the book can’t deliver and, unfortunately, this is why a lot of people didn’t like it.

This is everything for this month. See you next time!