allisonmenck's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Graphic: Emotional abuse, Homophobia, and Domestic abuse
Moderate: War
mahitdzmare's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
Moderate: Blood, Death, Emotional abuse, and Murder
claudiamacpherson's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Moderate: War, Grief, Violence, Blood, and Murder
Minor: Child abuse, Death of parent, Emotional abuse, Abandonment, Confinement, Fire/Fire injury, Gore, Child death, Classism, Gun violence, and Sexual content
imaginingly's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Graphic: Blood and Death
Minor: Classism, Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Genocide, Grief, Gun violence, Torture, Toxic friendship, and War
booksthatburn's review against another edition
Moderate: Violence, Body horror, Death, Genocide, and Cannibalism
Minor: Self harm, Slavery, Emotional abuse, Blood, and Colonisation
yvonne_cl's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
Graphic: Violence and Blood
Moderate: War, Abandonment, Confinement, Emotional abuse, Lesbophobia, and Murder
Minor: Death, Death of parent, and Gun violence
beforeviolets's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
My thoughts on The Hollow Heart are hard to express, because though I enjoyed the book and thought there were a lot of beautiful things about it, I felt that it really disappointed me as a sequel.
Contrary to The Midnight Lie, this book uses multiple POV's, a choice I really enjoyed. Not only did we experience the POV's of our two main characters, we also had a third, omnipotent POV that helped add a mysterious narrative and gave Rutkoski more room to manipulate our understanding of the world,
both past and present. It offered more wiggle room to play around with timeline and connections in a way that I felt was really unique and made the work more godpunk in genre, which I'll never say no to.
But as much as I love Marie Rutkoski's descriptive writing and as much as I adore the characters and the world of this series, the sequel just fell short for me. There was a powerful, heartwrenching, almost Greek Mythology-style tale filled with conversations of heroism and love and mortality built into the framework of the story but seemed to only start about 75% of the way through. To be given such a beautiful tale only in the last handful of pages really just felt like a waste, and by that point, I had been waiting so long for the plot to kick in that the story had lost almost all of the stakes and all of my interest. I really wish those last pages had been stretched out and expanded upon throughout the whole narrative instead of jammed in at the end.
And all the elements and details that I loved so dearly in The Midnight Lie (the romance, the banter, the characterization) were just completely discarded in this book. Part of it made sense for the character arcs but it mostly just made me feel like the heart of the story itself was hollow. The romance was no longer believable, the story was disjointed and anti-climactic, and the characters felt lackluster when they had previously captured my heart.
In the art world, when making comics or graphic novels, there's a rule that states that you should draw the joints of a figure above or below a frame, but never right on the edge of it, so that our brains can subconsciously continue the image offscreen. If you draw the joint right at the edge of the frame, it disrupts the visual flow of the body and causes the viewer's brain to stop the image at the joint. It's jarring and subconsciously difficult to process, and I think that's exactly what Rutkoski did. With the two books, she sliced the plot right in the middle, right at the joint, in a way that disrupts the flow and makes it difficult to be able to connect the two stories.
EDIT: My friend El and I JUST figured out (while writing this review) that this duology is a spin-off of one of Rutkoski's other works. With this knowledge, I'm realizing that the reason that I found so much of this book confusing or wasteful or empty in terms of plot was actually because Rutkoski just spent a large chunk of this book retconning her other series. (This required a lot of recaps and info dumps that seemed useless to wrapping up this duology.) To me, especially considering this series is never mentioned to be connected to the other in terms of marketing or otherwise, that is such an act of disrespect to the story of The Midnight Lie. Sid and Nirrim deserve their own full and complete narrative, not for their story to be coopted as a way to fix the issues in Rutkoski's former work. And now this series is the one to contain glaring issues that need to be fixed since much of it was dedicated to telling another story. Truly such a failure on the author's part.
Graphic: Blood, Violence, Emotional abuse, Gun violence, Torture, Death, and Colonisation
Moderate: Murder, War, and Self harm
Minor: Addiction, Drug abuse, and Drug use
deadbookishsociety's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
Starting of with Nirrim who I loved in the firat book watching her grown to the person she became , I really felt detached from her in this one, i know there were reasons for what she did but still her character lacked the charm she has in the midnight lie . Sid on the other hand was the only character who kept me going, her story and the way she not only dealt with whatever was going on in her life , I felt like she became the main character by the end of it all leaving behind nirrim . Her chapters and pov was all I was looking forward to .
And the end it felt incomplete in a way , it yet again the only way it could have ended but it somehow didn't feel like it , considering how both the books were 400 pages long it was too short for a fantasy duology and everything by the end felt rushed.
Anyway this book was an okay read , I'll still recommend it to people who live fast paced , easily world building and maybe corruption arcs .
Thank you netgalley and hodder & stoughton for providing me an arc for this book
Graphic: Violence, Murder, Physical abuse, and Emotional abuse
tiredbookish's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
I absolutely loved the multiple POVs and interconnected stories in this sequel. I appreciate especially being able to see inside Sid's thoughts.
Nirrim's POV was difficult to read, but in the best way. It was like she was a shadow of her former self and leaves you just begging for other characters to try to help her faster.
I read the original Winner's Trilogy after I read The Midnight Lie and fell in love with Marie Rutkoski's writing style. I appreciated Sid's POV bringing us back to characters from TWT, but still focusing on her and making sure this was her story.
Sid's descriptions of how she experiences gender also made me feel very connected to her. I thought Sid seemed like a nonbinary lesbian in the first book and this one pointed even more in that direction.
I loved the focus on familial love as well as romantic in this story as well. Love and forgiveness have been major themes in both the winner's trilogy and this duology and I think they are written and emphasized so beautifully.
My only complaint is that I wish it was longer so that I could have seen more of Sid and Nirrim being together. I don't think it was a bad thing that they were separated, it was necessary for the story, I just wish we had gotten a little bit more.
Like the first book, the writing was absolutely beautiful. The way environments and feelings are described made me put down the book several times just to think about how pretty those descriptions were.
This book, especially near the ending, read like a beautiful queer fairytale and I look forward to more of Rutkoski's writing in the future.
Graphic: Emotional abuse and Murder
Moderate: Child abuse and Physical abuse