I read an eARC of The Art of Destiny by Wesley Chu. Thank you, NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group.

For me, this book suffered a lot from middle book syndrome.

On the positive side, I actually found the assassin’s side of the story the most engaging this time. I still wish we weren’t following quite as many characters, though. Jian continued to be a disaster of a student, and his part only bored me a little. Taishi was fun to read while she was still training Jian, unfortunately, I wasn’t too interested once they separated. I continued to not care at all about Sali. Which is too bad, because she’s the only character that is from her people whose perspective we follow, unfortunately, even while she’s dying, the most interesting things are what’s around, not her.

I did like how the religious sect that used to basically worship Jian as the Hero, went to calling him a Villian. And I especially appreciated the hateful “brother” character that tries to gaslight everyone around him for his religion by using war arts to lace his words with compulsion to believe him. He was definitely my favorite villain character.

Other than that, this book stretched certain points out too long, and it became hard not to skip the parts I didn’t care about to get to the bits I did.

Keep in mind, this is from the perspective of someone who usually hates middle books, and this felt like the middle book of middle books.