It has been a good while since we last dove into the Dark Crystal-verse, right? I'm definitely continuing to review these books, it'll just take a while since I have so many other book series to catch up on. Ah well, I got book three for my birthday, so here's my opportunity to read and review it! Spoilers ahead!
The word is out to all seven Gelfling clans: The Skeksis are secretly evil and draining Gelfling-kind. Amri and his friends have been assigned a difficult task by Aughra: to light the flames of rebellion within each respective clan. But this proves more difficult than initially thought.
So while I really liked the first two books in this series, this one was pretty disappointing to me. I wouldn't call it bad per se, but it feels a bit lacking in comparison to the first.
One of the main things holding it back for me is the characters. First of all, I did not consider Amri to be an interesting protagonist. He has his whole "I want to be someone, not a nobody"-plotline, but other than that there's really not that much to him. I didn't hate reading from his POV, but I personally found Naia's and Kylan's to be much more enjoyable.
But even the other characters weren't all that great. This book probably had the most appeal to me out of all of them because I knew of two aspects: skekSa and the Tavronica ship. SkekSa always interested me from the start, because she's one of the initially neutral Skeksis even while the others of her kind had already started draining Gelfling. As for Tavra and Onica, I've wanted to see these two together for such a long time now. There's two canonically shown gay fathers on the Netflix series, but these books reveal that the characters of Onica and Tavra that appear in the series, also were in a relationship. You know me, I love my LGBTQ+ representation.
But honestly, I was let down by both these aspects. SkekSa isn't even all that prominent in the book (despite being on the cover) and initially starts out interesting but doesn't have as strong of a personality as I'd hoped. She also turns over to the other Skeksis' side pretty quickly, so all of the interesting potential of a good or at the very least neutral Skeksis for her is just wasted. Yes, I know that we got skekGra in the show, but I'm just talking about the books here.
Onica and Tavra are both present and they are said to be in a relationship in the text, but it's held back by the fact that we can't have any really tender scenes between the two of them due to Tavra's current predicament (see: her physical body dying and her soul now being tied to a spider). So I just felt somewhat let down by both this and skekSa's portrayal.
There is still more world building, which I suppose is kind of cool. I liked the introductions to the Dousan and Sifa clans and seeing their territories and customs, but other than that this book didn't have all that much for me.
So, yeah, it's honestly just okay. I will still check out book four, I've come this far after all. But this book just wasn't it for me. Maybe I've been hyped up too much back when I was really active in the Dark Crystal fandom, I don't know. I've heard skekSa is still active in the last book, so she may get her time to shine there. And, who knows, maybe they can finally bring back Tavra to a Gelfling body somehow.
Rating: 3/5
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