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Darkwell
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Darkwell (Forgotten Realms: The Moonshae Trilogy #3)
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To be honest, so far it feels like the Greatest Hits of everything I disliked about the first two Moonshae books. Tristan, who is supposed to be our hero, is still really whiny and clueless and his love interest Robyn seems like more of the prophetic hero than he is.
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As I mentioned in my reply above to Don, I'm not enjoying this so far. There's a lot I've disliked about the series as a whole and it feels like this third book is just going for that. A pointless rape in the first chapter, Tristan continues to be a whiny idiot who doesn't deserve Robyn, and the author not being clear on why/how things are happening.
For this last point, I specifically mean how the now-evil Genna used magic to change her looks, and judging by Tristan's behavior it seemed REALLY obvious that she's also used magic to "seduce"/mind control him to take her to his bedroom so they can get it on. But later in multiple passages Tristan insists that it WASN'T magic coercion. So he just acted like that over a complete stranger on his own volition? And how did evil-Genna know Robyn would even go to Tristan's room to catch them in the act? And why does no one care that this woman (who literally no one in the castle had ever seen before) immediately disappeared after it happened? Furthermore, this is an incredibly lazy plot device to get Tristan and Robyn angry at each other.
The only thing I've really enjoyed so far was chapter 6, Shantu. It mostly focuses on the displacer beast stalking Daryth and it's actually quite tense with good descriptive language. But I think it would have been better placed later on in the book or after we had established more about Shantu itself. Also, why does Daryth basically get to live long enough to confess that he also loves Robyn before he gets ganked? Lazy. I'm sensing a theme for this book.
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Unfortunately I'm still not enjoying this book. There's a lot of skipping around from character to character, sometimes for only a few paragraphs, and within the same chapter. I wish each chapter was devoted to one character so we weren't hopping around so frantically.
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I actually finished this about a week ago and just couldn't find the energy to update here. I really did not like book and thought it was not worth reading the first two books of the Moonshae series just to get to this.
The first couple books have their problems, but Niles doesn't seem to have learned anything from it and instead just doubles down for this conclusion of the trilogy. There's an unnecessary rape reference in like the first chapter (which I guess is meant to show us how evil a wizard is, but it honestly amounts to nothing more than the author starting the book off with rape), the plot is all over the place while also taking forever to progress, and Tristan is somehow a worse person while Robyn (the real mvp of this series) ends up blaming herself for his actions.
Honestly this was awful, the ending is lackluster, and I read any future books by Niles at this point.
Schedule:
June 1st - June 9th Chapters 1 - 6
June 10th - June 17th Chapters 7 - 13
June 18th - June 25th Chapters 14 - End
PLEASE let Tristan have gained some maturity since the last two novels!