Ugh. I wanted to like this book so much. And I did. In pieces. But not as a whole. The Fragile Threads of Power picks up a few years after the Shades of Magic series. On some level that should have been a bit of a red flag for me because follow-… | By Q on July 4, 2024 | Ugh. I wanted to like this book so much. And I did. In pieces. But not as a whole. The Fragile Threads of Power picks up a few years after the Shades of Magic series. On some level that should have been a bit of a red flag for me because follow-up series have trouble keeping my interest the same way the originals did. 1) The original buzz is now gone, so that's just a net loss. But they still have to start a series and try to make you care about it the same way. The only one off the top of my head that managed that was the second Percy Jackson series, but the Apollo books very much did not do that for me. This book did put some new buzz in but not enough to replace the feel of falling for a fictional world the first time. 2) You have to strike a fine balance between the old characters and the new ones. The Dreamer trilogy that followed the Raven Cycle did that well. This one didn't do the balance as well. Frankly I was more interested in the new POV characters than some of the old ones, especially Alucard. Key thoughts on the book: - This was billed as a sequel series that didn't have to be read as a sequel series. Maybe it would have been better for me then, but I pity the fool who reads this first and tries to make sense of all the dynamics going on.
- There are so many pieces to like in this book. But it was so disjointed that I could never get momentum. The second you feel like you do, you jump to a POV that interrupts things. And instead of "I'll charge through to get where I really want," I would just nope out. And sometimes the jump wasn't even to a bad character. It just interrupted the flow. It took me SEVEN months to read this book as I kept checking it out and returning it via Libby.
- I did a mix of ebook and audiobook on this. The audiobook was interested because there were three narrators. That would make sense if there were three POV characters, but there weren't. And only one of the narrators was English. That was odd, but I looked past it and then went to look at what the narrators had done in the past. Turns out two of them worked together a lot on Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan books. And then it turns out they're married to each other. I don't really know what to do with this beyond saying it's odd.
- I'm probably going to read the sequels when they come up to see if they disjointed pieces start to come together in a way that makes more sense, but I won't be in a rush. Schwab's books, even when they're beautiful, have never been binge reads for me, but I've DNF'd one in the past year, and this one got closer to a DNF than I would like. 3/5 stars. I can only recommend with caution.
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