And I feel like we didn't really get to explore much of his storyline cause it was so thinly divided between all these other characters. Zoya, who is the other main character, she's a cool bitch. I honestly would have been just fine with reading about him and her, but instead we got so many perspectives of, like, side characters. Not even the main characters, the side characters. I'm like, I don't give a shit about them. I feel like if you're gonna expand your franchise, though, I think you should do it with new characters. You don't need to go back to the old characters. I can see how it might be tempting, cause everyone loves Nikolai, but you can make more lovable characters. I believe she's capable of that. One of the other main characters that we follow is Nina, who was one of the characters that was introduced in the "Six of Crows" duology, which was a separate book series she wrote but still within the Grisha world. And Nina is also a very well-beloved character. She got paid so dirty in this book, cause she barely did shit in it. She didn't really do much in the book, she was  kind of just meandering around. Which is a bummer, because in "Six of Crows" she was such a strong presence. In this one, it just felt like she was on the sidelines. The author didn't know what to do with her. There were definitely too many storylines, too many characters. You would be able to enjoy this book if you were like a mega fan. If you were like a Leigh Bardugo stan and you just eat whatever she shat out, you would do anything for her, this book is for you. Cause you get to see a lot of characters that have appeared in previous books. And I can see how people would get super excited for those characters that pop up. Even other people were telling me like: "oh my god, you need to read 'Rule of Wolves', because you might be excited for who shows up." Okay, but is that gonna serve a purpose to the narrative, though? Yeah, I could like this character, but if they're just there for the sake of being there but they're not serving an actual purpose in the story or they're taking away what is supposed to be the original point of the story, that's just not enough to, like, impress me. In terms of fan service, I'm sure it's great. In terms of narrative, though, I just felt like it was very long and unnecessarily convoluted. Alright, now we're gonna move on to the last category, which are the two star ratings. One of the books that I ended up rating low was "Ash Princess". This is a young adult fantasy book that I actually picked up because a bunch of my friends read it and they loved it. [laughs] And I wanted to get on the hype train with them. Unfortunately, I must have gotten on the wrong train or something, because we just totally were on the wrong tracks. "Ash Princess" follows a girl who was six years old when her country was invaded and her mom got murdered right before her eyes. So, that's how you know it's a young adult story:
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