Review: Shadowcaster

Shadowcaster by Cinda Williams Chima
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was a pretty disappointing continuation of the series, considering I pretty much devoured everything that came before. I was hanging out for a continuation of the first book's adventures but instead it's all about Adrian's sister, Lyss, who has to be one of the most boring characters of the series. There's a ton of boring war talk and lots of marching, and most of the time I didn't really get what was happening. Probably didn't help that I'd mostly forgotten the first book, so there were a bunch of references I knew I was supposed to get but didn't.

The blurb builds up the inevitable relationship between Lyss and Hal, a commander on the opposite side. But aside from a random skirmish early on, we see very little of Hal until well over halfway through the novel. It made the relationship between them pretty hard to swallow, and it felt incredibly false and rushed to me. Then you've got Breon, a completely random addition who at least injects a little character into the story, but even he doesn't do anything particularly exciting.

Then, when you're finally getting used to the fact that this story is separate from the first, (view spoiler)[Jenna shows up and flies around on her dragon a bunch(view spoiler)[, which probably could have been saved for the follow-up novel. It was just too random and felt out of place in this story.

The story itself dragged on with nothing particularly exciting happening, but a lot of it. It spent so much time talking about war tactics that there wasn't really a lot of character development, and there was little fun to be had. It was simple enough to read, but I really struggled because I thought this would be a two-day read tops but I avoided reading it because it was so dull.

Plus, (and stop reading here if you don't want spoilers for the Demon King series or Flamecaster) I'm still so mad that Han was killed off and Raisa was relegated to overbearing mother. They were such kick ass characters in the first series and I just feel like this one would have been so much better if they all just slayed together. I miss Cuffs. :'( The first series he and Raisa tore it up, they were such great characters and the relationship between them developed so beautifully over the four books. And then Flamecaster came and it was all, 'they've had their big moment so let's turn their happily ever after into a nightmare so the kids can take the spotlight.' I'm just so heartbroken by that decision. This could have had crazy family dynamics and badass wizardry and mad father-son/mother-daughter/etc teams but instead the pie got cut up into giant lonely slices on giant separate plates. Devastating.

Dragons are cool though.

I don't know that I'd recommend this series after reading this book. I'll still read the third one when it comes out, just because I did actually enjoy the first one, but lets hope the writer was just off her game in this one rather than me being blind to bad writing this whole time and only seeing it now. (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)]

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