RULE OF WOLVES Review

finally finished rule of wolves by leigh bardugo it took a bit longer than i expected to finish this which is i guess an indication of what i thought about it i thought it was fine okay i felt similar to what i felt when i read king of scars my ranking of the grisha series is six of crows quite high on top then shadow and bone and then king of scars even though the writing is quite a bit better in the series honestly i felt this book was similar to cj and storm in terms of pacing and the plot and the politics etc unfortunately i happen to think siege and storm is the worst krishna book anyway we'll talk about those the first part is going to be spoiler free but i will assume you have read king of scars and in the second part we'll talk about some spoilers just like we did with king of scars by the way as you know shadow and bone netflix show is coming very soon now and there will be tons of content on that i will go over every episode and compare them to the books so make sure you subscribe if you don't want to miss that all right rule of wolves the last book on the grishaverse saga at least quite for a while honestly i doubt it's gonna be that long a while because it seems like the show is going to be successful and leigh bardugo will probably get some pressure to write the next book we already know that we should expect a new six of crows books sometime in the future but i am assuming there will be a ninth house book before that i wonder if she has any other projects that are not grishaverse related i guess we'll see but i'd like to start with the cover i haven't been talking as much about the covers because during this global catastrophe i start getting more ebooks and audio books and i forget to talk about the covers when i don't have a physical copy but for this one i do have it the cover is just this off-white color and red it feels a bit like embossed there's some texture to it and there's this shield design similar to the one on king of scars but simpler i assume this is supposed to be an ash tree but the whole cover almost has a feeling of bone carving inside the dust jacket is this burgundy and silver and grayed version of the dust jacket color it is very elegant and beautiful cover i like it a lot i'm glad these ones don't have that shitty netflix sticker on them all the shadow and bone and six of crows books now have that obnoxious printed netflix stick around them all the coats are on the back and the spine is super nice and clean too rip imprint unfortunately the publisher for these books had to close due to the circumstances we've been going through but they've done a great job with this cover there's also a super nice map i think this is the most detailed map so far it's nice to have anyway rule of wolves picks up right where we left so we have nikolai being able to control his demon zoya with her new powers princess aery of the shuhan and ravka after her guard mayu tried to kill who she thought was nikolai but it was like a random guy they tailored to look like nikolai then we have nina and fiera with hannah and of course the elephant in the room the secret prisoner and the thing i hate the most about the series stop here if you haven't read the king of scars i don't want to spoil this but yeah if you have read it it's the darkling the darkling is still the worst part of this book i'll talk about it more in the spoiler section so an important thing about this book is the spoilers in this book are quite huge they will ruin your experience there are big changes so be careful if you haven't read it yet don't go to reddit or don't even look at fan art it's pretty serious one complaint i had about king of scars was that the two separate stories you know nikolai and zoya on one side and nina on the other side were too disjointed i would say they're still somewhat disjointed they're not really directly related although they affect each other a bit more and they cross over a bit more still it treats kind of like two stories even their conclusions are kind of separate but related so it's not as bad there are a lot of battle scenes in this book i happen to not like battle scenes even though i am a fantasy fan i just get really bored it feels like the most important thing is the results like who lives who dies in these fight scenes there are some interesting moments so i want to say they're terrible i'd say they fall somewhere in the middle like there's some character development in the fight scenes i suppose but again i'm not a huge fan there are cameos some better than others i thought some of them were pretty good i really enjoyed them even though they're just cameos you can just take them out and replace with something and it would still work but i thought some of them were fun and others were just plain pointless we get to see a fair amount of shuhan shuhan has been neglected quite a bit in the grishaverse i enjoyed learning more about them i think those parts were interesting it's mostly political intrigue which i'm not crazy about but i still liked it because there's a new character she is the shuhan queen i thought she was a fun ambitious character still not much novi zem though so we'll have to wait for the next book for more on the zemeni one thing i hate about the whole grisha verse is the existence of judah param it sounds weird because my favorite book is six of crows but i think it destabilizes the magic system too much it's too unpredictable for my taste obviously we can't ignore it but it's sort of getting less and less of a thing which i like but there isn't a lot of magic use in this book anyway especially now that nina and zoya have super interesting powers i was hoping to see more of those and there are some scenes maybe it makes those scenes more interesting when there isn't too much magic use the strength of leigh bardugo's writing is obviously the characters and those parts are still good there are great moving emotional scenes between the characters there's great dialogue writing nikolai is super charming and i got to like zoya more and more nina and hannah are also great the dark link still sucks i'm sorry i'll never be not salty about that plot development i know he's hot okay i get it one significant problem that i noticed was what i call deflated tension between chapters so this book cares a lot to switch to a different character at the end of a chapter and sometimes it ends on a note that seems like it will be important like and then the door rang you're like oh no who can it be and you get to the chapters of the other viewpoint characters then three chapters later it's revealed that it was just a room service nothing important it happens several times it's quite annoying but there is one time it happens when it's actually a huge thing and a huge thing happens off screen the ending was good it doesn't resolve everything though and it sets up the next book so even though this was marketed as the final book in the grisha verse saga it actually doesn't quite resolve what i think is the biggest issue of the series so the next book whatever and whenever it may be will deal with that overall i wouldn't say i'm disappointed but i wasn't thrilled either after king of scars this was pretty much what i expected to get and i got it but this is it for the spoiler-free part of this review if you haven't read the book this is the point you stop you are warned the spoilers are huge and you don't want to get spoiled on this book for sure maybe leave a like before you go if you enjoyed this video to let me know and then go ahead and read the book real quick and come back after that all right spoilers i hate everything that's happening with the darkling he was completely unnecessary to anything that happened in this book just so he can sacrifice himself for rafka or something does anyone really think that darkling cares about rabka he is an exceptionally selfish character who doesn't care about anyone but himself his cover is that he keeps saying he cares about rauka but in the end all his choices have been for himself only it doesn't feel right to me that suddenly here he is like fine i'll sacrifice myself i think rune and rising had a great ending for the darkling i think there could have been many other solutions to this like what are we gonna do with the darkling now are we gonna kill him again no we cannot kill him again so there has to be something else to do with him now and we'll have to wait until the next book to see what that is obviously nikolai offers to sacrifice himself but i get that we can't have that because we need the happy ending of him and zoya ruling the country but if we never had the darkling we could have had one of the saints take the sacrifice it also doesn't need to be eternal pain it can just be that you'll be alone in the darkness or something but i mean overall the main problem of the series is the fold so king of scars should have solved the issue with the fold i think we got digressed by this whole huge battle between nations and missed the actual problem now we need to wait for kaz to solve it and i guess well is better than kaz but it's going to be an object fetch quest which i absolutely hate i don't think lee gave this enough thought maybe she'll come up with something better in time but i hate mcguffin fetch quests where you need to get the powerful object to magically solve the thing i hate the way the darkling got his powers back what was that thornwood what's even that he pricked alina and mal and got his powers back where did that come from that was so random and why are we torturing alina by putting her in the same room with this again i don't think we needed to see alina and mal at all they have their orphanage let them just be happy for five seconds also what are all the new sun summoners doing it seems like they're absolutely useless why are they not biting the fold alina was able to at least deflect the volca even the first time she used her powers so imagine having many sun summoners but this book pretty much completely ignores that which is annoying david died out of nowhere what the hell was that i swear leopard just kills characters she gets bored writing which is fair but i feel like she did the same thing with matthias poor david deserved better but also jenya deserved better let the girl be happy for five seconds what the hell i guess someone had to die in that random bombing but the main reason is probably now we have laney and david doing the same thing we can't kill lenny because she's just too new of a character to introduce and kill so it has to be david it makes me sad because i like to have functional relationships that is not all drama and jenny and david were a nice couple like zoya and nikolai are constant tension come on i like them together but that's not a simple relationship zoya is the queen now that is interesting and fun it was unexpected but i'll take it i can definitely believe nikolai sacrificing himself for rafka unlike the darkling everything he did was for his country he doesn't even like being the king the guy is an inventor and a pirate so when he offered to sacrifice himself to hold back the fold it actually made more sense to me it makes no sense that nikolai and his father has personality traits in common that's not how genetics work that part was just dumb like magnus was able to escape and he's also charming or whatnot that doesn't make sense we got a sister for nicolai but where is the darkling sister come only why you do this just give us oola she is mentioned in passing but if she is not a main character in the next book i'm done with grishavers i have spoken i really enjoyed nina and hannah's relationship i think that was beautifully done i don't have anything to say i was furious when i thought hannah was dead i swear i was gonna throw the book across the room i got so annoyed i did not see the twist coming at all but when it happened i was quite happy although i don't think it was set up properly that's some serious tailoring skill to get so suddenly but i'll forgive it because it was what i wanted whatever i don't care did we talk about everything i think so let me know if i forgot anything in the comments let me know what you thought about this book we're not getting a new book for a while i wouldn't expect it until 2023 when the second season of the show will be coming out probably if it gets renewed but we have a long grishaverse marathon ahead of us we'll dissect each episode please join me for those they will be a lot of fun i'm very excited i'm also excited about some new content i'm making you might have noticed there are some more bookish songs now there are a lot of shadow and bone and six of crows songs in the making i hope you enjoy those videos too anyway this has been a longish video i'll see you in the next one [Music] [Music] a blade

Channel: Memodeth Books

Views: 1,352

Rating: 4.9245281 out of 5

Keywords: memodeth, memodeth books, rule of wolves, leigh bardugo, shadow and bone, king of scars, six of crows, book review, nikolai lantsov, rule of wolves leigh bardugo, book reviews and recommendations, rule of wolves review, rule of wolves book, rule of wolves leigh bardugo review, rule of wolves spoilers, rule of wolves discussion

Id: MEu5Z7uzuM8

Length: 13min 21sec (801 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021