Book Review: Tower of Dawn

Title: Tower of Dawn
Author: Sarah J. Maas
Rating: 2.5/5 Stars
Series: Throne of Glass (Book 6)
Why?: Series

My expectations for this book were a bit of a roller-coaster. At when after reading the first four books, my expectations were pretty high. After reading the fifth book, they went down a little. And after the first 20 pages of this book, they went down a lot. Until about halfway through the book, I wasn't sure I was going to finish and was basically dragging myself through.

Here was my main problem: the plot twists were not twisty in the least. Within the first 30 pages I had successfully predicted 2 out of the 4 main plot twists. That's not a good thing. The characters were pretty predicable too, considering they followed the same track that a lot of this series has followed... Introduce pretty girl to handsome guy whom she originally hates, then make him take off his shirt and boom, they are in love. There isn't even a question if that will happen or not, it's basically a given.

So, main grievances: plot twists were not twisty, and characters were kinda generic/flat. Also, really slow beginning.

But the ending. This deserves a special little moment of pause because I actually kinda liked it. Like somewhere in my cold, stone heart there was a little bit of this weird happy feeling before I found something else to angrily fixate on. Basically because it seemed like a compromise so that the stone-hearted people such as myself would grudgingly admit that yes, that was a good ending. It is SO hard to talk about this without spoiling anything... But I liked it and I don't normally like the endings of these types of books so A+ for effort.

Am I glad that I finished this book? Definitely. And not only because it would have driven me nuts for days if I hadn't (giving up on books is SO hard for me). I feel like the ending was worth the first half of this book, just because it was so shocking for me that that is how it would end. Again, so hard to talk about it without spoiling anything but it was so atypical for this type of book that I couldn't help but applaud the deviation from the track.

The reason why my rating is so low is because while it was a quick read and besides the grievances listed above I didn't really have too many other problems, there was nothing (besides the ending) that jumped out at me and was like WHOA. It was just like... okay, I guess.

This book was supposed to help me determine if I was done following the series or not, but now I have no clue. Because it wasn't my favorite, but it wasn't completely awful.

See this review on Goodreads.