Book three time! Will it be as good as the previous two? Spoilers ahead.
Meilin is separated from the main group and tries to save her homeland for the Conquerors. Meanwhile, Abeke, Rollan and Conor go looking for the next talisman: the one belonging to Dinesh the elephant.
Out of the entire series so far, yeah, I would say this one is the weakest. Not bad by any means, but I just wasn't as invested. I like the characters still quite a lot and I like how Meilin gets her own time to shine this time around, but I also think I prefer to have our characters working together as a unit rather than them being separated.
One of my bigger gripes was how this book looked like it was going to be really Meilin's book, but in the last third it ends up being much more about the entire group again. Like I said in the previous paragraph, I like these characters working as a unit despite their differences, but I also prefer it when each book focuses (mostly) on one character. We can still have POV chapters from the other characters, but it works when one character out of the four gets their time to shine and the most development and focus. Think about how they handled Conor last book.
Here, all of it is building up to this being truly Meilin's book, but then in the end she's just shoved back with the main group again and loses the heavy focus on herself. When this is a very intense book for her side of the story. The Conquerors are overtaking her homeland and she's trapped in a bamboo maze while others are dying out there. She finally manages to find her father the general, but he rejects her offers of help and instead sends her away to re-join the Greencloaks. And then he later ends up dying quite brutally to a crocodile, something which of course greatly upsets Meilin.
But in the last third it just feels like she gets less focus when the events in this book make it clear it really should be focusing more on her this time around. Again, I'm not saying we should forget about the other characters, but just give them a little less focus in order to properly develop one character like they did last book. Except this time for Meilin.
Still, she wasn't handled downright poorly here, either. She does get some good focus and I liked her conversations with Xue, and her slowly starting to warm up more to Jhi (though I don't think they've quite a complete connection yet). And the others are also handled well. I'm also very glad Rollan got to make a major decision in the end which ended up saving the day. He's not that much in the book (mostly knocked out due to being sick) but he does at least get something major to do in the end which ends up winning over Dinesh to their side.
And this book also continues the cool world-building. We already have neat characters and lore so far, and this time we get to explore a bit of Zhong, with both Meilin's journey and the quest of the Greencloaks to locate Dinesh and his talisman. And we get introduced to a warrior people who ride rhinos into battle. Which is just an all-round badass concept.
So, yeah, while I do have to be honest and say I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as the last two due to the heavy focus on Meilin vanishing after a while (and it also feeling really short when compared to the last two books), it's still a good book. Just...not the greatest. I do hope that book four improves again! Looks like we'll be traveling up north to the ice realms next time around.
Rating: 3.5/5
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