Greetings friends and mostly enemies! Today we're doing the first of the two reviews that you guys were waiting on me for. On the docket so to speak, Janima Ressie's The Savior's Sister. So the Savior's Sister is a companion novel to her first or not her first, excuse me, the first in that series which is The Savior's Champion. And I understand that you're kind of sorta supposed to read The Savior's Champion first. I didn't do that because I'm a little rebel. So I read The Savior's Sister first and I'm not going to bury the lead on you. It's good. But it's not perfect, it's by no means an unrepentant master work that is beyond reproach or critique. And let's talk about some of the things that I found a little bit wanting. And then we'll move on to the stuff that makes the book still awesome and worth reading. First, Jenna uses one of the tropes that I hate most of all. I cannot tell you how much I hate this trope. You know that trope, that thing they do in storytelling where one character has something really important to say to another character and every time they try they just can't get the words out or someone barges into the room or explosion or whatever they just can't have this conversation that would literally cut out half the runtime of the show or half the pages of the book. The one we all hate, yeah, that trope. TV tropes calls it, cannot spit it out. And yeah, that's pretty much this circumstance in a nutshell. Our protagonist, Lila, tries to tell the male lead Tobias some really important stuff through the entire damn book. And it's like, she had so many opportunities and her reasons for not doing it were absurd. And it's like, I get it, she was nervous, she had some reasons to be nervous. But come on, I'm supposed to believe this is a mature, competent, fierce woman who can't say something that's a little bit painful to someone just because she has an emotional investment in this someone. It's a little bit out of character and it was a little bit distracting. And especially it got really distracting and frustrating when it drug on for 500 pages. So that really, really bugged me. The other thing that I would say kind of bogged down on me was in my eyes there's a plot hole. And it's kind of explained away in the text, but in my opinion the explanation doesn't hold water. Here's why. So we have a political thriller here where the main plot point is a power struggle for the throne of Thesson, the fictional country we're in. And the savior, Lila, is trying to regain her political station from her father who has usurped it from her. And basically the only thing that's preventing her from being in power is her father who is currently the sovereign, the king, whatever, and his senate. And she's already killing people in the book. And there's absolutely nothing stopping her from just killing all these people in the night because she has a magical power set that would make assassination, especially in the dead of night when they're all asleep, insanely easy. The explanation we are given is that she doesn't want to assassinate all these people at one time because that would leave some of their associates, their network as the word is used in the book, unexposed. And she wants to find everyone responsible for the plot against her. And that explanation doesn't hold water and here's why. If you kill the guy who you served your throne and all of his closest supporters, it doesn't matter what ground level people he still has alive, they are incapable of taking your power from you. It doesn't matter if the bandits and assassins and mercenaries that he still has working under him survive your slaughter fest. If no one is left alive, who has any claim to your political power? And Lila is smart enough to know that. And so are some of her advisors. And so that was a glaring plot hole in my opinion. But in Jenna's defense, without that particular plot hole, as I see it, the book wouldn't have happened. And the book kind of has to happen. So I'm really overlooking it because this book is so fucking good. This book is so good. Jenna's writing style is so witty and tongue in cheek. It is delightful to read. It is fun and witty and she does banter like nobody's business. She has some of the best banter I've ever read right up there with like Jim Butcher, who does banter wonderfully right up there with Josh Whedon, who is like the king of on screen banter. And so Jenna has witty banter and good snappy comebacks and one liners down pat. I'd say that's damn near Jenna's trademark as far as I'm concerned. So that's really nice. The other thing is her characters are so good. She has very good sense of empathy. She has a very good sense of motivations and humanity. And she creates these characters who are well rounded and believable and alive. They are the best word. They are simply alive on the page. You love them or hate them respectively as you're supposed to. And Jenna just does a wonderful job of that. The other thing that makes this book so good is she's created such a in-depth fleshed out world. And I really want to see more of it. I am very eager to read the sequel because Jenna has just created this world where she answers some of your questions and leaves you with a dozen more. And it's like I need answers. She has a soft magic system in place. And I really want to see what the limits of that magic system are. I'm curious if she's going to define it enough to where it kind of traverses the boardy traverses the border between being a soft and a hard magic system. And to be fair, she may have already done that in the Savior's Champion. I haven't, like I said, I read the companion novel, the Savior's Sister first. I have not read the Savior's Champion. I'm going to now, you best believe. But so far, I think her magic system falls firmly in the category of a soft magic system just because we really only have a few barely, barely defined rules. And I mean, they, they've only been loosely defined. So definitely a soft magic system in my opinion. Overall, I would definitely give her book a four out of five, a nine out of ten. It is so good. It is so fun to read. It is so well written. The whole thing is amazing. And I'm going to be buying the Savior's Champion, like I said. I'm going to be buying the sequel. And frankly, I think you should do. That's pretty much, that's the whole shebang. I don't want to give too much of a in-depth, spoilery type analysis of it because some people I'm sure are in the same boat as me. And they haven't read the Savior's Champion. And the Savior's Sister just came out. So I'm not going to drop a whole bunch of spoilers. Go read it. And if you want to hear me talk about it more, drop a comment. And maybe I'll do a follow-up video after I read the Savior's Champion. And we'll get a really heavy in-depth discussion of the world going because there's a lot of things to be discussed for sure. So, there you have it. That's my review of the Savior's Sister. Keep your eyes out. But sometime this week, hopefully I can get it read a little sooner than the Savior's Sister. It's a 560 page book and I'm not the fastest reader on the planet. Battlegrounds is a bit lighter. So hopefully I'll be able to get that done. You know, in a reasonable time frame. And as always, like, comment, subscribe, do all the YouTube things, and I will see you guys next time. It's...