Nocturnal Book Reviews

Alright, here is the deal. You remember how much I enjoyed Throne of Glass last year? I'm sure Crown of Midnight would have come a close second if only I could read it properly.

My kindle ARC was horribly formatted. Sentences missing endings, words missing half of their letters like c on instead of coffin or ve instead of five. Words strung together and so on... My eyes hurt every time I was reading it, and it took me two weeks to finish this book. I sincerely hope that the finished product will be corrected otherwise Bloomsbury will experience a lot of refunds.

You can see, that my judgement was impaired but even then I managed to gather some enjoyment from this book. Crown of Midnight is a lovely and exciting mystery and just as dark as the first book. Celaena is still her bloodthirsty self, but until she experiences a serious trauma in this book she lacks focus. She just flits around here and there and even her blooming romance with one of male characters doesn't do anything for the plot and her character development.

That traumatic experience though, - it brings back this dangerous, almost feral edge which is what old Celaena was about - a little bit snarkalicious, a lot vicious and all lethal. I absolutely loved that.

That girl works best in extremely stressful circumstances, otherwise she gets bored. I also enjoyed her interactions with Chaol and Dorian. There is no love triangle anymore, thanks God. Instead one of them is for her to love and another becomes a friend, and it's good to see that there can be such a development instead of cliched battle for a proverbial bone.

Prepare for dungeons and monsters, forgotten labyrinths, traitors, riddles and talking door knobs. Crown of Midnight is a delightful addition to Throne of Glass fantasy series, it doesn't give away its secrets easily, and I'm looking forward to the next book from Miss Maas to find out more about Celaena, Dorian and Chaol's twisted paths.