World-Building: Annoying
Characterization: Terrible
Plot: Nonexistent
Other: Preachiness overload
First of all, don't read it. This book has no plot, has nothing to do with Ember or Sparks, and keeps beating you over the head with simplistic world views every few seconds. Also, while its predecessors Ember and Sparks had wonderful characterizations this book fails to create a character I could even remotely care about. The one strong message that I got from this book is that World-Building is everything. Whether it's the real world, present or historical, that you're describing and showing to the characters or an invented world from your own imagination you have to give it enough depth so that the story has a place in which to exist and feel real. In this novel, the world-building did not have depth and this made it painful to read.
In fact, I wasn't able to drag myself through the entire novel. After about a hundred pages of painful nothingness I had to stop. I read some reviews online and found out that the last chapter was the only one that had a connection to Ember so I read it and was again disappointed by the couple of paragraphs that were put in there as an afterthought.
The entire novel felt like an excuse for the author to showcase her point of view about religion - which came across as simplistic and gave the impression that she doesn't know much about any specific religion but just hates all of them. If she had just focused on telling a story and let the morals and ideas come through that naturally it wouldn't have been so bad, but writing an entire book which was focused on getting across her views came out unreadable.
I'm still going to read Diamond of the Darkhold because it's about Lina and Doon and I have hope that it'll be at least halfway decent, but after this one my expectations are much lower.
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