A review by millie_rose_reads
Shadow's Bane by Karen Chance
3.0
I spent a long time looking at the rating system with this book. On one hand, the writing is as lively as ever, and the character arcs are satisfyingly rooted in conflicts foregrounded since the first book and further built upon from there, and each book always feels like its own complete chapter—all of these points convince me this book is more of a three-point-five star book, not that I can actually rate it that here. What hampers the rating somewhat is the problematic pacing compounded by a story fixated on fey matters. Dory's parent-series, Cassie Palmer, has also been heavily fey-leaning as of late but its managed to off-set that better with offering up catharsis for a lot of its major series-spanning questions. Dory doesn't have the legacy of eight or nine books to pull this trick off, so it flounders in business that always feels tentatively Dory-adjacent than something Dory's personally invested in.
That said, this book did a lot of work to better ingratiate Claire into the story, and while it's not perfect and largely amounts to Claire owning up to her own prejudices, it's a step in the right direction if Chance is determined to make Dory and Claire's friendship credible. Then there's also her relationship with Louis-Cesare, which always seems to mine the right kind of drama for just the right amount of time: Louis-Cesare battering Marlowe's head against piano keys made me smile to the point of discomfort.
The plot revolves around Dory hunting down fey slavers out of loyalty to Olga, and then, over six hundred pages, this quest becomes a conspiracy of an ancient fey princess to get revenge on her killers, using a rare Dark fey ability to sustain herself for centuries. On paper it sounds fine, but in practice the situation is so divorced from Dory that Chance had to incorporate third-person flashbacks of Mircea to give context, and even then, Mircea didn't seem all that bothered by her either, really.
I get the urge to raise the stakes higher and higher as the story continues, but if you can't compellingly connect them to the protagonist, I'd recommend smaller, more intimate stories. The first two books did this, and Fury's Kiss was a superb balancing act, but I think Shadow's Bane doesn't quite hit that mark.
That said, this book did a lot of work to better ingratiate Claire into the story, and while it's not perfect and largely amounts to Claire owning up to her own prejudices, it's a step in the right direction if Chance is determined to make Dory and Claire's friendship credible. Then there's also her relationship with Louis-Cesare, which always seems to mine the right kind of drama for just the right amount of time: Louis-Cesare battering Marlowe's head against piano keys made me smile to the point of discomfort.
The plot revolves around Dory hunting down fey slavers out of loyalty to Olga, and then, over six hundred pages, this quest becomes a conspiracy of an ancient fey princess to get revenge on her killers, using a rare Dark fey ability to sustain herself for centuries. On paper it sounds fine, but in practice the situation is so divorced from Dory that Chance had to incorporate third-person flashbacks of Mircea to give context, and even then, Mircea didn't seem all that bothered by her either, really.
I get the urge to raise the stakes higher and higher as the story continues, but if you can't compellingly connect them to the protagonist, I'd recommend smaller, more intimate stories. The first two books did this, and Fury's Kiss was a superb balancing act, but I think Shadow's Bane doesn't quite hit that mark.