Author: Richelle Mead
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!
In which Richelle Mead does 50 Shades of Grey!
I panned volume three in this series so why, oh why, did I start in on volume 4? I cannot understand this behavior in others, and typically, I do not indulge in it myself. A bad review is the end of a series for me. I don't go looking for the next volume in the hope that it might get better. Life's too short to waste on bad writing; however, in this case, I plead mitigating circumstances.
One of my biggest beefs with the first three volumes was Rose's relationship with Dimitri. I didn't care about the difference in their ages which so many reviewers made so much of, because from a sexual PoV, Rose was legally an adult in Montana so: no issue, get your heads out of your asses clueless reviewers.
That said, the real problem was two-fold. First there was the very serious issue that Dimitri was the authority figure in Rose's life. He was her teacher, which is what made their relationship completely inappropriate. Dimitri should have been fired for his misconduct. The second problem was that the relationship simply did not work. There was absolutely no basis for it whatsoever, so to continue this patent fiction that there was this irresistible bond between them was ridiculous in the extreme, and I was thrilled to see it busted.
Herein we have the reason why I came back: Dimitri was gone (as a potential partner at least), and I thought perhaps things would improve, and I'd like the stories better now that he was out of the picture. Unfortunately, Rose still couldn't let him go. She had this completely stupid 'moral obligation' to stake him and 'rescue' him from that 'life'.
This, in itself, is also unmitigated bullshit, given what we've been told about strigoi. He was effectively dead and gone. He knew nothing of his life before. He was little more than a rabid animal at this point, and there was nothing Rose could ever do which would change that or be appreciated by him. So make no mistake, Rose did not perform any heroic act here. She did not do a single thing for Dimitri. There was no Dimitri any more. As was made clear at the end of Shadow Kiss everything she did in this volume was purely for selfish reasons which had nothing to do with him or her juvenile infatuation with him.
What Rose did do here was to selfishly and completely forsake and abandon her best friend - the one she had so often sworn she would die to protect. So once again the biggest problem with this volume is Rose, as usual. We've spent the previous three volumes being reminded countless times by the narrator - Rose herself - how desperately she wants to be not just a guardian, but Lissa's guardian. Nothing else matters, we were told time and time again, yet she forsakes Lissa at the drop of a bat, and hares off to slay Dimitri, thinking she's somehow rescuing her lover from his fate as a strigoi. Yeah, right. What Rose did here was to betray every principle of guardianship that she had ever been taught, and for purely selfish reasons.
The most inexplicable thing about this volume - at least to begin with - was that it had a prologue! It's volume four in a series for god's sake WHY THE HELL DOES IT NEED A PROLOGUE? And why does Mead need to use the phrase 'kind of' three times in the first two pages? These first two pages aren't pages 1 & 2, BTW, they're pages 17 & 18. Chapter one doesn't begin on page one, so this isn't actually a 503 page novel. Just so we're all on the same page...!
It began rather interestingly, but way too verbosely. Mead could have trimmed this down by probably two hundred pages without losing anything vital if she had self-edited instead of running off at the mouth with way too many details - particularly fashion details. Would anyone in Rose's position even remotely think about what the hell fashion someone else was wearing and how good or bad they looked? And it sucked how often she felt the need to describe how "beautiful" someone was, as though there is absolutely nothing in the universe more important than how skin-deep pretty people are. Jeeze!
And what's with going to Russia? Yeah, Dimitri went to Russia, but there is no explanation offered as to why. He's not a thinking being any more (so we're supposed to believe). He has no human impulses. He's a mindless vampire who is driven solely by blood lust - and he decides to vacation in Russia? I call bullshit on that one. The only reason this took place in Russia was not because of some critical plot element but because Mead simply wanted it to, and she wasn't a good enough writer to put together a decent plot to justify it.
That said, and apart from the wordiness of this volume, there was some decent action buried in all the silly descriptive prose. In Russia, Rose is easily kicking strigoi ass (how she manages this is a bit of a mystery, but let's let that one go) while trying to get a lead on where Dimitri went, by locating his home town in Siberia. How the hell he even managed to even travel there is a mystery which goes unsolved. Oh, and Rose meets an Alchemist!
This is a brand new feature which has had zero mention for three volumes but which now turns out to be an integral part of the lore - conveniently only revealed to guardians upon graduation! Alchemists are magical chemists who can, for example, create cloud potions which completely erase strigoi bodies - conveniently for serial slayer Rose. Equally conveniently, Sydney - the alchemist - is assigned by a higher power to accompany Rose to Siberia where equally conveniently, after taking out two strigoi and collapsing, Rose magically ends up in the home of Dimitri's family.
This is one of endless examples of really bad writing. There are way-the-frick-and-frack too many coincidences in this novel, even by YA standards. I mean how convenient is it that everyone in Russia, no matter how back-woods and out-of-the-way they are, speaks perfect English? When Rose trips back to Lissa's mind, it's inevitably and without exception when some crucial event is taking place. It's never, ever, ever when when she's sitting on the can, or reading a fashion magazine (inexplicably enough), sitting bored out of her gourd in class, sleepily watching TV, or humping Christian.,/p>
Indeed, so convenient is this insta-contact that we get a detailed history of the arrival and installation, and the drama surrounding the new headmaster, who has a disaffected daughter, Avery who will be a TA (no, that's not tits and ass although it might as well be), and a younger son who is going to attend the academy as a student.
At one point Rose is given a healing charm - she puts it in her pocket for a rainy day. How come the magic doesn't wear off as soon as it's close to her? But that's not what important. What's important is that when Dimitri inevitably encounters her, instead of killing her as strigoi do - as we've been told repeatedly that strigoi do - he takes her prisoner and abuses her as a sex slave, a la Fifty Shades of Grey! Then when she stakes him at the end, he falls off a balcony and she never checks on him, dumb-ass guardian that she is, and to top all of that, he sends her a note when she's back in the US assuring her that they will meet again. In short, he behaves completely out of character for a strigoi based on what Mead has been telling us for the three entire volumes prior to this one. Seriously?
This novel was by far the worst and most badly written of the entire series and I am now done with this ridiculous series completely.
