Review: Badly paced and annoyingly predictable
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 07 11, 2012
Also appears on The Screaming Nitpicker.After being vaguely impressed with Maas's first Throne of Glass novella, I eagerly started reading my copy of the second, The Assassin and the Desert. It saddens me to say I'm disappointed in this novella. Predictable and poorly paced, I'm hoping the next two novellas and the novel do not resemble this novella in any way.Celaena is slowly developing into a more realized character with flaws, and the novella itself details how she is having to suffer the consequences of her actions (since she is sent to the desert as punishment for freeing the slaves in The Assassin and the Pirate Lord, the previous novella). Still, the convenient way everything works out for her in the end does not escape me. Once is once. Twice is coincidence. Let's hope there won't be a third instance to make it a pattern.Most of the novella is spent on training. Running six miles across the desert, imitating an asp, doing all this other stuff... It doesn't make for a very readable story and I kept picking it up and putting it down. There was no driving force to The Assassin and the Desert until the seventy or eighty percent mark, when Celaena finally realizes what is happening and hurries away on her new horse to save the day.And really, I figured out the entire plot in half the time it took Celaena. Everything added up as easily as one plus one plus one plus one. This dude's hint here, this characters stupid action there, this chain of events over here--I almost felt insulted  and I got impatient waiting for Celaena to catch up. If Maas is this bad at writing mysteries and it's not a one-shot deal, then Throne of Glass (which appears to have a mystery as its primary plot) may not be as enjoyable of a read as I am hoping it will be. Either way, such a poorly assembled mystery did not entertain me like the action of the first novella did.Next is novella number three: The Assassin and the Underworld. It can't be much worse than this, but one thing I've learned as an often-masochistic reader who is usually determined to finish a book no matter how bad it is? A bad book/series can always get worse. I'm hoping it will be better, though. Fingers crossed, rabbit leg nearby, and so on.