(This post first appeared in Lucien's site.)
At last we have come to the conclusion of Crown of Midnight! If you haven’t finished the book yet, beware of the spoilers below!
Given my thoughts on Throne of Glass, the main thing that struck me with this sequel is that writing. Compared to book one, Crown of Midnight is significantly better in terms of world building and even character building. I felt that those in the background had a little more weight to them and I felt like I got to know some of them a bit better than the background characters in the previous book.
I really liked Celaena being a cut-throat monster and get some real bloodshed from the Adarlan’s Assassin. I also enjoyed the magic of this book and the mystery of what’s going on. While Throne of Glass had a “bad guy” (Cain) to be defeated, there wasn’t really a main big bad in this book. Sure, Archer was totally not cool and obviously the King needs to be killed, but we knew these things from the get-go. Having more mystery about Dorian’s power and Celaena’s family origins really made this for me and provided a strong reason to continue with the series.
Points were taken from this book for the love triangle attempt and for Chaol in general (sorry to his fans). As we have learned from the last two checkpoints (here and here for those who skipped ahead), I can’t stand Chaol. I want to punch him in his stupid face and take up where Celaena left off and rip the whole thing away. His actions were just so unwarrented and considering how an assassin is technically part of his team when he does security at parties, it would make sense to tell Celaena of any threats to literally anyone in the castle, let alone Nehemia. This was a fictional death that I won’t soon get over because of how easily it could have been prevented by these morons.
And then the love triangle thing with Dorian and Chaol being constantly jealous and/or mad at each other just got tedious. I get it, don’t get me wrong, but I just felt that this time could have been spent elsewhere and honestly Dorian being magical would have been a stronger reason to keep these two separate rather than just fighting over a girl. If anything, all of this nonsense only goes to show how untrustworthy Chaol is.
But enough complaining from me.
Over all I give this a solid and well earned four out of five and I’m more interested in continuing the series now that we’re set to meet some of the Fae (and thank the gods it’s finally out that Celaena is Aelin) and we’re out of Rifthold. A change of scenery is definitely needed as well as a split in the party. Celaena needs better friends, Dorian needs to take a breather, and Chaol needs to smarten the hell up.
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