Reviews

Arrow's Fall by Mercedes Lackey

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lovelybrains's review against another edition

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5.0

Great ending to theis trilogy and it opened up the world of Valdemar for me

holly_153's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny lighthearted mysterious sad tense medium-paced

3.5

murderbot42's review against another edition

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Book 1 was so good. Like really well done. Then book 2 comes along and takes a nosedive. Really problematic with her sleeping with her teacher and also supposedly really liking another guy but it was "okay, cause that's what heralds do. sleep around!" uh huh. yeah. So I skimmed book 3 to see if it got any better.

Reader, it does not.

Recommended for: Absolutely no one. Don't read this series if you have modern sensibilities. It will offend you at one point or another.

trsclee's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

4.0

rahellarad's review against another edition

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1.0

Okay WOW I had thought that Lackey was getting a little heavy-handed with peppering the sex and sex-related scenes/motivations/crimes/villains through what I had believed to be a children's book series, but this book saw the line, and charged over it at full speed.
I would have actually appreciated a trigger warning on this one, so here's yours for the book: TW graphic sexual violence!

The clumsily handled

Spoiler

rape scene

comes from absolutely nowhere and is thrown into the reader's face for no reason other than shock value. It adds literally nothing to the story, Talia's development as a character, and definitely doesn't further the plot. Completely unnecessary to include it instead of, I don't know, actually writing coherently about grief and loss instead of just using further suffering to beat the reader over the head with? 0/10 did not appreciate its inclusion in the book, or the fact that the entire experience AND aftereffects are written off as 'inconsequential' in the face of other minor grievances that we are supposed to believe are more important to the plot -

Spoiler

wedding anyone

? I got the ick ~~and was also triggered~~ so badly I actually almost didn't come back to finish this absolute dumpster fire of a novel. Even after working up the nerve to come back and finish it, the way Talia's recovery was handled is insulting to every SA survivor out there. What aftereffects? Everyone knows you can actually just wish away PTSD because you really want to, and it would be inconvenient for the author to write about!!!! Not to mention that Talia herself says that Dirk getting his heart broken was worse than what she went through. Are you kidding me?! This made me so f*cking angry I had to go for a long walk to settle down. For someone who's writing an empath character, Lackey sure seems to have no clue at all how to handle sensitive subject matter.

You'll notice that up until now I've also kept quiet about the Lifebond element of this book - that's because its absolute bullsh*t and what even was the point of including it? The pointless love triangle was... pointless! And why was Kris entangled in this mess? He and Talia both know where they stand, and yet neither of them thinks Dirk needs to know that information, despite Kris literally knowing that Dirk is feeling the effects of a Lifebond. We're also supposed to believe that this guy Talia has met once before in the first book in this damn trilogy is her ~chosen soulmate~ and that they love each other unconditionally, despite them having had maybe three conversations in their lives, and us knowing next to nothing about him and him not even being relevant enough to warrant his own appearances in any of the preceeding books. The only emotions we ever see from Dirk are "hurr durr me angry" or "hee hoo me love Talia" - he doesn't even stop to

Spoiler

properly grieve the murder of his best friend, whom we were told was 'so close as to almost be brothers' with Dirk

because he's too busy being loved up to care/think about it. This whole Lifebond concept had merit in Arrows of the Queen, but this hamfisted, haphazard, slap-a-couple-of-people-together-and-call-them-soulmates approach in Arrow's Fall honestly did both characters dirty. Talia had so much potential to simply be a strong character on her own, and also... who even is Dirk. Perhaps even more annoyingly, there was absolutely no actual 'obstacle' to overcome in their 'relationship', it was just Talia, Dirk, and Kris all refusing to talk to each other and wilfully ignoring the issue or refusing to do anything about it. If there's anything I hate more than a pointless love triangle, it's intentional miscommunication, and this went a step beyond intentional miscommunication - it was intentional stupidity.

Sloppy writing overall: the villains were written terribly with confusing and conflicting motivations, and the main guy who should have had his villainous moment didn't even get it, we just got told to essentially ignore three books' worth of breadcrumbing about him being the Big Bad. Random people were brought back in a vain attempt to make it look like there was some forethought about the plot, and the coolest guy in the whole book only got one good scene that was perhaps a single page long. The pacing was way off - we spend three quarters of the book reading about nothing in particular, then gloss over the climatic battle of the series in less than three pages. Then we spend another WHOLE CHAPTER on the distinct lack of any differences in Talia following what should have been a soul breaking experience, and then have to have our hands held through

Spoiler

Talia's wedding

which served no purpose other than ticking off a fairytale ending.

Absolutely do not recommend this book to anyone, it's a steaming pile of garbage. Honestly this has me totally put off reading any more of the Valdemar novels because I just don't trust Lackey to handle any kind of trauma in an appropriate way. Read the first book in the series, and then don't continue from there.