Well I didn’t see that coming. I’ve got thoughts though, which I’ll expand upon later.

Okay, so thoughts, here goes, review with spoilers:

Spoiler

I'll say straight off that the strength of this book lays in the narration and the narrator, unreliable as he may be. It's funny because most of the joy I get from other books comes from the characters, and identifying with the characters and what they're experiencing, thereby inserting myself into the story and having it become more of an immersive experience. I don't get that here. I don't identify with anyone (except maybe Mr. Kindly? Ha), but I have so much freaking fun reading about them that I kind of don't care. It's also one of those rare books where I don't really care who lives and who dies....which I suppose is a good thing, because there's like loads of death here. Normally I get so wrapped up in things that I'm crushed if anything happens to a favorite character (I guess the tween in me never died) but I can still entertain myself even when someone croaks (as Tric did in book 1). That's not to say that characterization here is weak, or that it's so strong in other books....it's just different, and that's good, because I think the strength of the Nevernight Chronicles is that they're different.

Anyway, I digress...

Mia's adventures in the gladiatorial world sure are something. Kristoff writes action like you watch it, if that makes sense. It's odd to cringe away from reading something gross in a book, because reading about someone getting their skull crushed in just isn't the same as seeing it (i.e. Oberyn Martell), but I found that happening a lot. Mia's whole scheme is so cracked out it's not even funny, but hell if it wasn't entertaining going along for the ride. So the quest for vengeance continues, is one of the main driving points to the story here, and was super fun reading about, even if I did think she was taking it a touch too far. I thought I'd hate being away from the setting of the Red Church, but I didn't. I wasn't a huge fan of Gladiator and its ilk, but this was fun, and I found myself on the edge of my seat during most of the matches.

So yeah, I liked pretty much all of it, but I'm going to get into the thing that bothered me the most here: Ashlinn.

I didn't have a huge issue with her in book 1, but she wasn't anything memorable. After her grand betrayal and totally ridiculous murder of precious cinnamon roll Tric, the boy with a heart of gold, I understandably couldn't stand her, so to find her coming out of nowhere and to have Mia pretty much falling in love with her far too easily for my liking, considering what she did, has me feeling all sorts of confused.

Here's the thing - Mia is a murderous, vengeful bitch (our narrator tells us so, many times), but she's got purpose and drive, and despite her murderous tendencies, her awful temper, and her unceasing drive for vengeance, she still had morals in the sense that she wasn't killing people that didn't have any involvement with her plan. Oftentimes this was to her detriment (see the scene at the very beginning of the book, when she almost got caught because she couldn't bring herself to kill that girl). She has some semblance of morals, or guilt, or enough of a conscience
or whatever you want to call it to put her own self in danger to save innocents.

So we've established that Mia does have a grasp of right and wrong, in some form. So she gets involved with Ashlinn, and then remarks about how maybe the reason she feels drawn to her is because they're not different - i.e. the drive for vengeance, the willingness to do whatever it takes. One or the other of them actually says this at some point, I think maybe even in response to Mia specifically calling out Ash for killing Tric and Ash sort of throwing it back in her face like how is it any different from the crap she does.

Well, here's how it's different: Mia has already demonstrated that while she is willing to do what it takes to get her revenge (she wouldn't be doing the whole gladiator thing if she wasn't), she still won't take it to the point where she's killing people that are just in the way but aren't directly involved in her plan (outside of her Red Church duties, anyway). You see this in the very first scene of the novel, and then again to a much greater degree when she fake kills her fellow gladiators. Now, wouldn't it have been easier to just fucking kill them all if that's what it took to get her in front of Scaeva? That's what Ash would have done. It's what Ash did in killing Tric. So if you ask me, her and Ash really aren't all that similar, and that makes me really NOT understand what she sees in her AT ALL. Ash isn't a good person if she's willing to kill good people to get what she wants....so all of Mia's poetic waxing about how wonderful she is makes no fucking sense, especially if she's not even really willing to take Ash fully to task for what she did, especially if you consider how decent of a person Tric was.

They've all had shitty lives, you know? Crappy childhoods, etc, but the only truly selfish, awful one of the bunch is Ash, if you think about. She's the only one that was willing to go that extra step of killing someone who was in the way, yes, but totally and wholly undeserving of it. Mia's fellow gladiators were in the way, but she got them out instead of just running train over them.

Now, lest you think I'm saying this because I'm team Tric and I don't like girl/girl stuff, you'd only be half right. I am team Tric. I don't care about the girl/girl stuff. I know the whole thing with Mia realizing she liked girls too here was played off as some sort of realization/revelation on her part, but if you couldn't tell she was bi-sexual after the first book I dunno what to tell you....it was written on the wall in big, horny letters as far as I'm concerned. She might not have fucked women yet, but she had tendencies, and that's cool. It's that of all the women she could have picked, she picked Ash, and then tries to justify her attraction to someone that murdered the guy that was essentially her first love by saying they're like the same and not that different and blah blah blah. No. You don't get to do that Mr. Kristoff (well, I guess you do because it's your book at all, but I'm pissed dammit!). If you want to have them fuck because of lust or whatever, AWESOME, GO FOR IT. I get lust. Lust is understandable, and the great thing about lust as that it often doesn't have to be explained away. We're animals, sometimes we just want to screw like animals. But please, for the love of Aa, don't try and construct this grand romance around a premise that isn't only thin, it's total BULLSHIT.

So yeah, there you have it. Tric didn't deserve what happened to him, Mia should have been a lot angrier about it than she was, especially toward Ash (and given her prior history of holding grudges) and Mia and Ash aren't really that different, but the main difference between the is a HUGE, HONKING, GLARING difference, and I suspect it might wind up getting Mia killed in the end, since we know she dies and everything.

Whew....it was good to get that off ma chest. Now on to Darkdawn.