Book Review: Glass Sword (Red Queen, #2)

Author: Victoria Aveyard

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Edition: Hardcover

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Related Reviews: Red Queen

Rating: 3 Stars

Mild SPOILERS below for Red Queen.

I read Red Queen earlier this year and absolutely loved it, so I was obviously more than excited for this one.  While it was still a decent book, I think I was expecting far more and was overly disappointed by this one. 

Glass Sword picks up where Red Queen left off and follows Mare and her allies as they search for the rest of the new bloods and hope to build an army able to do battle with the silvers.

My biggest problem was how much this book was trying to be.  There are at least three acts, but each act felt like it wanted to a novel and they didn't seem very well connected.  The beginning of the novel read like a tyrannical dystopian, the middle like a quest, and the end like the beginning of a series.  It wasn't hard to follow, but it was annoying to be tossed around so  much.  I understand that there was important world building being done, but there is such a thing as too much at once.  It was nearly impossible to keep track of all the new places and faces introduced.  And there are a lot of new characters!  I couldn't even make myself care about most of them.  They were easy to lose track of and the book lost weight as it tried to make every single one of them as important as the last and they just blended together.

Another problem I had was Mare herself.  I really liked her and her voice in the first book, but in this one it was very hard to read.  She's selfish and a little whiny.  There are still redeeming qualities for her, but overall I felt somewhat depressed reading from her point of view.  And the characters that would have really redeemed her POV for me were either not there or used so infrequently that I forgot about them.

The biggest saving grace of this book is the ending.  It actually has two endings, I suppose, and the first one was somewhat predictable (though, not completely) while the second one came out of nowhere and made me sit back and take it in.  The final scene is very potent and I'm not sure how I feel about it, but it's certainly gotten me to think.  It's a cliffhanger and, had I been more thrilled with the book as a whole, I think I'd be feeling the full affect of it.  As it stands, it does keep me interested for the next book but not pulling my hair out.

As always, the writing was gorgeous.  Aveyard really knows how to craft sentences and they're a pleasure to read.  I do hope the next book manages to redeem the series for me, but I also do plan on finishing the quartet regardless.