wolvenbolt's reviews
213 reviews

So as with volume 1, volume 2 is just a collection of short stories in the Sun Eater universe.

This was much shorter than volume 1, which I liked. I don't wanna read an in-between novella that's 250+ pages when I am dying to start the next main book, so the shorter length was much appreciated.

This suffers from the same issues I had with the first volume: There are stories here that are about new characters I have zero connection to and don't care about. There are a couple stories here that are, but even then I only really loved and was gripped by one of them.

The stories I liked were Dragonslayers, Kill the King and The Four Devils. 

I liked this much more than volume 1, but there's still stories here that were just unenjoyable and sometimes boring, but luckily short

Tldr: 🤯🤯🤯😱😱😱

How do I even start this review? Jesus, what a wild ride! This is definitely the best book in the series so far, absolutely gripping!

I've a few things that I wasn't a fan of, but this book is 96 / 100 for me.

For starters, the middle of this book was....meh?
We were on a roller coaster from start til the middle and then it just...stopped? The gang is stuck in a library for years, in search of something they don't even know is there or what it even is.
And then the story hops us right back on the roller-coaster. It was quite jarring, like watching a one-shot action scene from the Daredevil TV show and Matt suddenly stops fighting to go sit on a chair reading a newspaper, flicking through the pages, then gently putting the paper back down and going back into the fight. Like I said, jarring!

My other issue was a lot of the explanations in this book were inadequate, at least for me. From the conversation with

Horizon

, the interaction with

The Quiet

and the histories unholding. Obviously I'm not saying I want a clear and concise exposition dump, but I'd prefer the drip-feeding or lore to be delivered in a more accessible way.

Hadrian's

second sight

and ability to avoid death, while fun, is starting to take a lot of stakes away from the story. The Dune series had the exact same issue with

Paul and Leto II's Omniscience

. When you have a character that is so overpowered that he always escapes death, it removes a lot of stakes when their life is being put on the line. How I would have dealt with this would be to focus on other stakes, such as their own power being used against them in a manipulation or people close to them possibly dying.

Nobody significantly close to Hadrian died in this book, and nobody (except for Valka) made me think they'd die either.

I liked some parts of Valka's character development, but wasn't a fan of some parts.
I felt like Ruocchio thought Valka was in the way of the story he was trying to tell and kept pushing her aside and out of the way. I think she's a brilliant character, and I wished she was present more.

I wish Alexander was worked on more, he was present at times in this book, there were some character growth moments, but he also felt very absent from the book too. I thought, as Hadrian's squire, he'd be shadowing him everywhere, that wasn't the case at all.

But yes, I do think there was less of a focus on certain characters and there was a lot more plot contrivances. And yet, I fucking loved this book 🤯
Despite these issues, this is still one of my favourite books! I'm so stoked for the next book! 🥳

So this is a weird one to review as its a collection of short stories from a series.

There were a couple of good stories but the rest were pretty lackluster and didn't really add anything to my understanding of the Sun Eater world. The stories involving Hadrian were pretty good, the other stories with random people weren't all that interesting.

I don't know the reason Ruocchio wrote these or if he gave any reasons, but I believe these were writing exercises for him, as I noticed some writing differences.

I don't think this book is worth buying, if you're big into Sun Eater and read all the books and wanna return to Ruocchio's world while waiting for the next book to release, maybe read this 🤷‍♂️

This really just adds to our picture of Hadrian and his morality, fleshed out the world building a bit and reinforces Hadrian's loyalty to Valka and reminds us he follows his own code, despite his promotion.

Good book, nothing amazing and nothing bad, it just exists to add to the world.

The first book I gave 5 stars, this book I would like to give 4.9 stars.

Its was brilliant, very slow to get to the brilliance, but still brilliant. The world building, character development, the plot and twists, everything was brilliant. However, the pace was very shaky, the book lost the grip it had on me from the first book a few times. But then Ruocchio pulled me back in with the grip of a vice, my eyes and ears and all my senses were fully in his power, unable to leave Hadrian Marlowe and his world of friendship and death.

This book did a lot better than the first, but some aspects worse. But alas, the greatest teacher is failure, and I'm sure the third book will be amazing, I'm certainly hooked now! 

What a debut! What. A. Debut!

It was a slow build for a few chapters, but then I was absolutely hooked. The characters, the world building, the tragedies, the twists, the hardships.

I can tell, already, this is gonna be a huge series and have an impact on me, I'm getting the same feeling I got when I first stepped into the world of Red Rising and Stormlight Archive, this is gonna be some beautiful world building and lighter fuel for the imagination! 

Moving onto Howling Dark now!