I really wanted to enjoy this book a lot. I've never read a
fantasy story with griffins (one of my favorite fantasy creatures. Also yes I'm spelling it as griffin because that's
how I've been taught.) as main focus before, so when I saw that this was a thing
that exists I just had to get the book.
Unfortunately, I really couldn't get into it at all. There
are many, and by that I mean many characters that are introduced really quickly
and a lot of them (too many) get POV-chapters, which made it incredibly hard to
focus and attach myself onto one character before suddenly we switched to
another character's POV. There's also no list of characters and what they look
like in the book, which made it rather hard. Most of the characters'
appearances are described only once or twice (with a few exceptions), and with
so many characters and POV to follow that are so quickly introduced after one
another it makes it very hard to remember who looks like what. If you have a
book with many characters, especially when a lot of them get POV time, I really
recommend adding some kind of character list just to keep us up to date with
everyone, their allegiances, what they look like (possibly).
Something that also kinda bothers me (though this is
probably a personal pet peeve and doesn't really have anything to do with the
story itself) is that the griffins in this actually have four lion's legs and
opinici are the ones with bird front legs, which is kinda the opposite of the
mythology, where opinici have four lion legs and griffins have the bird front
paws. I really, really do not mind if people get creative with
fantasy/mythological creatures, especially in fantasy books, but this is one of
the main distinctions between griffin and opinicus, so it just felt kinda odd
to see it switched up like this without seemingly any reason. I do really like
the addition of many types of birds to have their anatomy represented in the
griffins/opinici, and not just eagles, though!
What I will praise is the world building. I like the
griffin/opinicus societies, their lore, society, etc. Those were nice. I also
like the inclusion of kakapos. I don't think I've ever seen those described in
fantasy or even fiction, so that was nice.
But aside from that I just could not get into this book and
even nearly DNF-ed it at one point, which really surprised me because by all
means this should be a book I love. I love fantasy, I love animal/creature-POV
books, I love unique world building, I love war stories, etc. But for whatever
reason I just couldn't connect to Eyrie. I don't think I'll be checking out the
next Gryphon Insurrection books due to how hard of a time I had with this one,
unfortunately.
Rating: 2/5
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