Glass Sword by Victoria Aveyard

Glass Sword by Victoria Aveyard

Second book in the Red Queen series by Victoria Aveyard

 

(taken from Amazon.com)

The electrifying next installment in the Red Queen series escalates the struggle between the growing rebel army and the blood-segregated world they've always known—and pits Mare against the darkness that has grown in her soul.

Mare Barrow's blood is red—the color of common folk—but her Silver ability, the power to control lightning, has turned her into a weapon that the royal court tries to control. The crown calls her an impossibility, a fake, but as she makes her escape from Maven, the prince—the friend—who betrayed her, Mare uncovers something startling: she is not the only one of her kind.

Pursued by Maven, now a vindictive king, Mare sets out to find and recruit other Red-and-Silver fighters to join in the struggle against her oppressors. But Mare finds herself on a deadly path, at risk of becoming exactly the kind of monster she is trying to defeat.Will she shatter under the weight of the lives that are the cost of rebellion? Or have treachery and betrayal hardened her forever?

I must say, I did not prefer the second book in this series to the first. Probably because the feel changes from something like a mixture of dystopia, romantic drama, and political drama in the firt book to straight dystopia in the second. Lots of bloody scenes of homicide and torture. Lots of rather confusing dialogue from inside the protagonist's head. The second book gets a tad better about not using so much heavy-handed dramatic psychological language, but that's probably just because it turns its focus to bloody military operations, which isn't much better.

The interesting bits of dystopian lit are usually the in-between story: the inverted narrative that explains how the current world becomes the world in the story, and how those threads affect the characters, their choices, and their future. This series, however, seems disinterested in any of that intrigue, and would rather detail bloody torture scenes instead of providing necessary backstory. In fact, I think I almost found studying the map in the front of the book to determine if the setting was actually part of the northeastern North America or just a fantasy made-up land more intriguing than the plot development.

Overall Rating: 3 / 10 Stars 

I give this book only three stars because it ignores all the intriguing parts of dystopian lit, and wastes its efforts on all the rubbish ones. I probably whipped through this book for no other reason than that I kept waiting for it to get interesting; for it to start addressing things like how the world got to the place it's in in the series, where the blood mutations come from, for example, and how they relate to Mare's genetics. Instead, it wasted time weaving a military battle plan that makes little sense and is thoroughly uninteresting and irrelevant to the reader.