Glass Sword

Mare Barrow’s blood is red—the color of common folk—but her Silver ability, the power to control lightning, has turned her into a weapon that the royal court tries to control. The crown calls her an impossibility, a fake, but as she makes her escape from Maven, the prince—the friend—who betrayed her, Mare uncovers something startling: she is not the only one of her kind.

Pursued by Maven, now a vindictive king, Mare sets out to find and recruit other Red-and-Silver fighters to join in the struggle against her oppressors. But Mare finds herself on a deadly path, at risk of becoming exactly the kind of monster she is trying to defeat. Will she shatter under the weight of the lives that are the cost of rebellion? Or have treachery and betrayal hardened her forever?

The electrifying next installment in the Red Queen series escalates the struggle between the growing rebel army and the blood-segregated world they’ve always known—and pits Mare against the darkness that has grown in her soul.

DNF 40%

After Red Queen left me equal parts disappointed (by the lack of originality) and incredulous (also at the lack of originality), I should have handed this series back to the person who passed it to me like some sort of ancient curse. However, needs must when you’re staying in a remote cabin with no wi-fi and five tv channels, so I decided to give book two a crack. Hey, it could only be up from the bottom, right?

Wrong.

Christ on a bike, where to start with this book? I – and I’m sure many others – noted the … *ahem* similarities to The Hunger Games in Red Queen. Perhaps I was just still in that mindset, but opening this book with our recently rescued heroine and the rebellion fleeing from the powers that be, complete with bomb-dropping fighter jets and a desperate flee through a city that was long thought abandoned due to nuclear radiation? Seriously!? Just like the fact there are only so many chords some songs are going to sound the same, I get that there only so many plot points and some books are going to have similar elements. But when there are so many scenes that feel like they were cut and pasted from one book to another I can’t get then get fully engaged with a story because half my mind is thinking about another one.

What I read of the plot of Glass Sword was all but non-existent. Mare and her allies search Norta etc for other so-called New Bloods. They find one, we get a brief intro of their powers like that god-awful scene in X-Men 3 where Mystique literally reads character bios to Magneto, then they move on while trying to avoid Maven’s forces. That … seemed to be it. Oh, aside from Mare’s constant sulking and brooding of course. And her painfully contrived insistence on referring to herself as the Lightning Girl every five seconds. If Red Queen’s drinking games – Hunger Games rip-offs and YA tropes – could have killed you through alcohol poisoning, just imagine taking a drink every time the words “Lightning Girl” cursed the pages.

As with Red Queen, this book may be derivative and predictable but it also incredibly well written. I don’t care for the story or the characters (in case my reviews didn’t make that clear!) but I’d be tempted to pick up something else written by this author because, if the plot was more original, I imagine she can tell one hell of a story.

Eventually though, when it became clear that all my issues with Red Queen were still present and correct in the sequel, I gave up and binned off books three and four. I don’t know why I expected this one to be any better than its predecessor, but I have no one to blame but myself for wasting my time on it.