Author: Sarah J Maas
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Rating: WARTY!
Here's my advice on this series: Assassinate it immediately! While Throne of Glass (panned here) at least had the pretence that it was a fantasy novel, Crown of Midnight doesn't even so much as nod in that direction. Instead, it's a sad YA teen romance (which paradoxically has no romance worth the name).
It's written like fanfic, about a spoiled-rotten, moody, pouty, juvenile girl. The dialog is amateur and the characters not remotely credible. Why Maas has such a ridiculously high opinion of herself is a mystery (her website bulls her as a New York Times best-selling author which, while technically true, is not the sort of thing you expect to find on a realistic and professional author's website! Way to puff yourself up! Real authors let their work speak for itself. If it can speak.
So, you may ask, since I trashed the first novel in this series, why am I now taking on the reading the second volume? Well, it sounded intriguing from my reading of the first couple of paragraphs, and skimming a couple more pages - an assassin who doesn't assassinate?! - so even though I'd rejected picking up this volume once before, and even though I expected to dislike it, I realized that if I'd given the execrable Divergent series a second chance by reading volume two, and also given the sad-sack Taken series a second chance it would be churlish not to give this one the same opportunity to fail spectacularly.
And it did. Fail. Spectacularly. To be fair, it was better than the first one, although it would have been pretty much impossible to write a novel that was worse than the first. Maas needs to get herself some honest beta readers, and she needs to ditch whichever editor it was who worked on this sorry volume. Nothing happens in the first 200 pages except a pathetic romance wannabe which goes nowhere and is written so badly that it has no life in it whatsoever. The only thing it really tells us is how juvenile and stupid the main characters Chaol and Celaena truly are.
Chaol is supposed to be the captain of the king's guard, but he never does anything. He behaves like he's unemployed, sitting around the house and watching TV - except that there's no TV, only books. And there are billions of books in this castle. Chaol never spends time with his men, he never trains them or trains with them. They never have drills. Instead he leads a life of complete luxury, swanning around doing whatever he pleases, which consists mostly of chasing, and agonizing and mooning over Celaena like he's a whipped whelp of a pup and she's his owner; then Maas expects us to believe he's tough and manly. No, he's pathetic. I can see how Dorian, the other leg of the triangle would wander around aimlessly moping - he's the Prince Charles of this world, but Chaol has no such excuse for an excuse.
I know this is fiction, but are we really expected to believe that a senior captain in the military is feeling guilt over killing someone in combat in an era of barbarism? Chaol, the captain of the king's guard, is your standard boring trope muscle guy. At one point, Maas has him speak, and then in the same paragraph she has an internal observation from Celaena. This is poor writing, and was quite confusing for a second or two.
Here's an oddity you won't find in your ebook reader: my edition of this novel appeared to jump from page 19 to page 90, but then I realized that it was page 20, with a really bad font for the numbers, which made a 2 look like a 9! So, on page 23 (not 93), Chaol is thinking if only he could get his "damn" breath back", which brings me to another writing issue: to be damned or to damn, that is the question! Contemporary use is 'damn' and be damned to grammar, but Maas has set this fantasy in an historical age, so to me it would make more sense to get back to the original usage: 'damned'. To me, that would make it more authentic. "Freezing my ass off" on page 25 is another example of this; 'arse' would have sounded much more 'authentic' to me.
The main character Celaena Sardothien isn't any better. I have to say if I were writing a series (and trust me, that's never going to happen) I would not want my hero having a name which is reminiscent of 'hyaena', but Maas has no such qualms. I've seen other novels where the main character has a name beginning with 'Mal', which is the French word for bad, but in which the writer has exhibited no sign that she was conscious of meaning or implication behind words (which is sad enough) or that she intended to use the name for a particular effect. It appears that Maas chose that name for no other reason than that she liked it, and has given no thought to what the name means or what it suggests or implies. That's really sad for a person who purportedly works with words for a living. Main characters deserve better than that, and we deserve better authors than that, but this isn't even the worst problem.
Celaena is eighteen, and has gone through hell, yet she offers no evidence whatsoever that she has ever suffered over anything! Instead, she behaves like a spoiled princess in a contemporary high school drama, buying endless 'designer' dresses, eating chocolate cake and cookies (yes, Maas insanely actually calls them "cookies"! Talk about wish fulfillment! This medieval kingdom has so many modern conveniences (glass everywhere, for example, and what would have been, back then, exotic foods (sugar, for example) that I'm almost surprised that there isn't a TV in her room!
Celaena is billed as being the king's champion. Sarah Maas keeps using that word, but I do not think she knows what it means! Celaena is the king's assassin. A king's champion on the other hand, is someone who fights in the stead of the king if he's challenged to a duel. No one dares to challenge this ruthless king, so why he would need a champion is a mystery which serves only to speak badly of Maas's evidently tenuous grasp of what she's doing here. For example, Celaena is supposed to be the best assassin in the world (no evidence has ever been offered for that), and her king is the most evil ruler in the world, whose bidding she is forced to do. So why does she not simply assassinate him?
Celaena is a spoiled brat, there's no doubt about that. I mentioned in my previous review how spoiled she was in terms of her spacious accommodation with the king's castle. That was after I went into how spoiled-rotten she was as a prisoner in a salt mine, where the long imprisonment had apparently had no effect on her appearance, body-weight, or health. She's also apparently paid so well that she can buy luxury clothes. That we're frequently told how well she's dressed seriously detracts from the aura of deadliness she's supposed to represent.
Her schedule is pretty darned easy, too. She's supposed to be planning the assassination, on the king's behalf, of an old friend named Archer, but she actually has no plans to kill him. She informs the king that it will take her a month to plan this and he acquiesces without a murmur of complaint! Yet once she's begun spying on this target which the king wants her to take care of asap, he then pointlessly pulls her from her assassination assignation to attend a royal dinner! She's not needed there and the dinner occupies only a paragraph or two, so this bit of lousy writing is nonsensical, and serves only to transparently stir up the triangle between Chaol, Dorian (the king's son), and Celaena, who speaks to this prince of royal blood in the most disrespectful, if not outright insulting manner, and yet she pays no price for it! Absurd!
Another absurdity is that we're expected to believe that Celaena, the greatest assassin in the world (LOL!), has a conscience and is sentimental. I couldn't buy that no matter how many times Maas tried to sell it to me. It doesn't even fit within the very framework Maas created around Celaena. We spend the first two-thirds of this novel suffering the growing and ridiculous excuse for passion between Chaol and Celaena, but then with one event, a momentous one to be sure, but still inadequate, we see Celaena turn from love, from envisioning - indeed, all but planning - a life, and a marriage and children with Chaol, to hatred, where she almost kills him, and would have if Dorian had not stopped her! Way to cheapen your romance, Maas!
Just how stupid and shallow a 'romance' can you create? Well read Maas to find out (trust me, the situation between Chaol and Celaena gets worse)! Stupid is actually what Celaena does best, because even the 'romance' isn't as stupid as the dumb-ass poem giving clues to where three 'Wyrd' stones are hidden. These are supposedly pieces of a gate between worlds, which can open the portal and which grant unimaginable power to their possessor, even if only one stone is owned.
First of all, if these things were purposefully hidden because they were too dangerous to own and impossible to destroy, then why would would they not have been tossed into the depths of the ocean? And failing that, why would anyone hide them successfully, and then write graffiti on a castle wall revealing where they are? And if Celaena's supposed best friend figured it out, why wouldn't she tell her best friend - the very person she needs to help her - what she had learned? I don't mind mystery and a scavenger hunt - they can be a lot of fun - but when these things are obscure and for no good reason other than authorly obfuscation, or when really bad writing and poor plotting is used ham-fistedly to obstruct things which anyone of even moderate intelligence would figure out at once, it's nothing but sad and tedious, and very amateur. Again, where was the editor? Swanning around eating cookies and chocolate cake maybe?
The means to read the poem is telegraphed many chapters before the clueless Celaena figures it out. It's obvious that one of the stones is in the dead queen's crown (presumably the eponymous Crown of Midnight), but Celaena simply cannot figure any of it out. I guess assassins really don't have to be smart in this world!
The final insult - like we haven't guessed this chapters and chapters beforehand, is that Celaena is a "Fae" princess, poised to take over her country and take down the king: you know the one she could assassinate at any time? She's known this all along, but it has never once crossed her mind, even when she was informed that people were looking for her! It's like Maas suddenly decided to officially turn her into the spoiled Disney princess that she's actually always been, but then was too lazy to go in and back-fill this story to integrate it into what she'd already written.
This is without a shadow of a doubt the crown of bad writing, period.
