King of Scars

I care enough about these characters to read about them and there are some good ideas here:

Humanizing Zoya's backstory
Nikolai's real and metaphorical demons
Nina's bitter grief and quest across cultures
People unexpectedly worshiping the Darkling

Perhaps most of all, I really like what Brandon Sanderson in Mistborn calls “What happens after the good guys win.” Oftentimes we gloss over that in an epilogue, so I like the politicking here and thought the intrigue in the capital was a good subplot.


But overall, I confess I was pretty bored. It felt like the plot got tripped up around the time they went into the sand world, and the momentum never quite recovered. After the frantically enjoyable pacing of Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom (which both transcend the top tier of YA for me, nearing the HP/His Dark Materials/Mistborn quality tier), I'm just a little bummed to see a much more ho-hum YA entry here.