Book Review: Glass Sword (Red Queen #2)

I finally decided to read the second installment of the Red Queen series.

Mostly I did it for my daughter. I considered the first one appropriate for her and she read it. We talked about it and I enjoyed hearing her point of view on different issues (especially the ending).

I was dreading the second book because I read in many places how horrible it was.

It wasn’t that horrible.

When my daughter checked it out from the library, I did, too. Not only that, I also checked out the audio book version to be able to continue it to and from work. My daughter is an amazingly quick reader and I am not. It was thanks to the combination of book and audio book that I was able to finish it before she did (that and the fact she lost it the day after she checked it out). Things happen for a reason.

The Red Queen world is a horrible, dark world.

It’s like the Age of Apocalypse (from the X-Men comic books), in which mutants rules and humans are slaves. In this world, things are pretty much like that. People born with silver blood have power and they reign. Literally, in a kingdom.

Like it often happens, power make people do horrible things.

Book two continues right were the first book leaves us, with our main characters running away from the evil new King. For about a third of the book it all feels pretty hopeless. It’s a pretty complicated world to solve. I didn’t enjoy the first chapters much because I just could not figure out who to solve the problem: the powerful king and his army of millions against a handful.

Fortunately, it does get a little better. The middle of the book is pretty decent. It is a war, so they are always running away, they don’t have resources and they have a lot of arguments (mostly about power), but the story moves in the right direction. There are some mild sex references, but nothing major.

And then the ending comes, when they will break into a prison, where our main heroine has a choice and she chooses to kill in cold blood. For some reason I didn’t think it was appropriate for how the series was going. Why turn the heroine into a monster? Sure, it was a cruel world and it changed her, but this is a seventeen year old girl who lost all her innocence. Maybe I just didn’t expect this, but I didn’t feel it was necessary.

The book ends, once more, in a situation almost impossible to solve. I don’t know what the author has in store for us, but now I need to find out and hope that at the end, everybody gets what they deserve. Somehow, I doubt it.

cheers!