A review by mmccombs
Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros

adventurous mysterious tense slow-paced

2.5

This was a tedious, confusing, overly long book and I will be reading the next one for sure. My main complaints are as follows:
  • There are way too many characters, dragons, and places. I simply did not know who most people were and kind of gave up when names happened to me. 
  • There are way too many elements to the magic system and it kind of makes no sense.
  • World building also makes no sense, what even is the government system? Since when is there a queen? Why are important political meetings happening at a war college with children and not in a government building with adults?
  • Writing is often unclear and vague, rendering action difficult to follow. 
  • The island hopping could have been almost completely cut with no impact to the rest of the story. I liked the idea of seeing new places in this world, but we didn’t stay in any one place long enough to truly know it and none of the things they did on those islands seemed to matter, except for the one island with the silver haired people that I forgot the name of.
  • The habit of killing off characters to immediately bring back, or in the case of Andarna leaving and returning, is so frustrating. Emotional impact for nothing?? Cowardly!
And the reason I’ll read the next book?
  • Dragons are cool.
  • I had a good time during the last like 10-15 chapters so I forgot all of the previous suffering.
  • A cliffhanger like THAT?!
  • I am most importantly very nosy.
This could be a much shorter book (and a much shorter series) with probably the same impact, but hey, I am into it and will continue to upset myself as I read this series.
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