A Gathering of Shadows|Review

This book was absolutely awesome. It’s definitely MUCH better than the first book, which I was kind of just “meh” about.

The writing flowed really well and the world building was great. This book is definitely character-driven rather than plot-driven. (Which is good for me because I like character-driven books better.) The characters are spectacular. I love them all.

There wasn’t much of a plot (in the traditional plot diagram way of things). Things kind of just kept happening and the book seemed more like a bridge between the first and the third book than an addition to the overall storyline. The whole premise of the book is kinda random. It doesn’t really flow from the first book. The events from the first book don’t even seem that essential in this book. It’s not really a continuation of the first book. It’s more like another adventure concerning the same characters. The book was definitely not slow-to-start, things were always happening, but there was no clear antagonist or major conflict for the majority of the book.

Lila is really trigger happy and I can’t begin to understand her. She’s really spontaneous. My issue with her was that when she went on her killing sprees, she rarely showed remorse, which didn’t make her seem real. She was extremely unrelatable for me. I still love her, though. But maybe that unrelatable-ness makes her enviable. Either way, she’s awesome.

ALUCARD IS THE BEST.

I feel really bad for all these characters.

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SPOILERS AHEAD… YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

I love Holland. Especially the idea of an antagonist that isn’t really bad just ‘cuz. Holland’s a good guy who is forced to make some hard choices. This goes along with the idea that everyone thinks they’re the good guy.

END SPOILERS

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Rating: 5/5

Apologies for the choppy post, guys. I’m still trying to figure out how to go about writing book reviews. This time, I took notes while reading the book and then put those notes into paragraph form. Obviously, that didn’t work. It was choppy and lacked my usual charm. Also, the whole thing seems rather negative even though I LOVED this book and I gave it 5/5. That’s probably because I only paused my reading to write about the parts I didn’t like because when I liked parts, I was engrossed.

I also should probably write reviews right after I read the book. I finished this book a week ago, so I wasn’t able to properly expand on the ideas I wrote down.

Either way, it’s a work in progress.