The Black Prism

I have a bit of a hard time writing down how I felt about this book. On the one hand, I often had the thought of “I don't really care about this”, switching really quickly to “Oh, that's pretty cool”, but it never really went beyond that (except for the first few chapters, which I really liked).

The world itself was pretty interesting, even if the magic system was a bit unnecessarily complicated (so many rules!), especially in its explaining of it. It was much all at once and I feel like I only got a grasp on it in the latter half.

Most of my issues though were with the characterization, I feel like Gavin was definitely one that was more fleshed out, while the others I couldn't really get a grip on and would find them hard to describe when asked. Kip probably had the weirdest “development” of them all, as in you never knew whether you'd get the self-pitying boy or the sarcastic badass. Corvin barely cares about his daughter's decision at the end even if we're told he really cares about her. On that note, I didn't really go along with or believe Liv's motivation for it either. Karris was alright, though it felt like more time was spent having other characters complement her on her beauty than on her character or her part of the story.

The story itself was pretty cool, as well as the powers, but for me it lacked a bit of a human aspect. It focused a lot on being action-packed, and sometimes went by so fast that you didn't know where the characters were at times (they could fly to other locations within a sentence). That could be exciting, but it also got old pretty fast and took me out of the story.