Graceish ✨’s Reviews > Golden Son > Status Update

[“Consider that I was vulnerable… that perhaps I fell into Cassius' bed because I was hurt & needed a salve to my pain. Can you imagine that? You may answer."

... "I suppose."

"Good. Now shove that idea up your ass… I am not some frill-wearing tramp. I am a genius. I say this because it is a fact. I am smarter than any person you've ever met, except perhaps my twin. My heart does not make my brain a fool.]

I think this series would have been better delivered in third person rather than first. I can’t stand Darrow, and I think it’s partially to do with the first-person narration. I think if I had been told about the story, rather than through Darrow’s perspective, I would like it more.

[At first, I thought the tattoos on her hands featured floral lines. Then I note a stream of mathematical notations: the Larmor formula. Maxwell's equations in curved-space time. Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory. And a hundred others that even I don't recognize.]

This is a prime example of the MC being completely unbelievable. This level of mathematical ability was never explained in his training. It’s nonsense.

How can a planetary system-wide drama feel SO white coded? You can sprinkle in the occasional POC, but so much of this is futuristic-WASPy shite.

[When the hole in the door is the size of a torso, he removes his helmet. A hairless, pale face stares as me. Eyes black. Wind-weathered cheeks armored with calluses like the hide of a rhinoceros.]

What am I not understanding about this? “A hairless, pale face stares as me.”? Should it be at?!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Darrow is an idiot, and an insufferable MC. Why on earth is he willing to trust <spoiler>Tactus, but has twice doubted Mustang?! I knew both times that Mustang wasn’t betraying. How did Darrow miss that?! But when Cassius betrayed him, when Tactus betrayed him and he was blindsided?!</spoiler> An absolute numb nut.

Darrow was an idiot in the first book, and he’s continues to be an idiot. What an unlikeable MC.

[Lightning lashes through the clouds outside; thunder rumbles. And I hear something. A howling. It is not the wind. Another flash of lightning and he appears, floating in the bitter storm like the ugliest angel ever shit out of heaven.]

Poetry. 🤌

[All these Praetors, all these politicians and sinewy men and women of war. I hold back a chuckle. Amazing the power you have when you're bloody up to the sleeves and none of it is your own.]

Not technically true. Page 117: “a blade scratches my forearm.”

Call me pedantic, but if you’re going to assert something as bold as how terrifying you are because off of the blood is none of yours, then be sure.

["In a world of killers, it takes more to be kind than to be wicked. But men like you and me, we're just passing time before death reaches down for us."]

Particularly applicable IRL, atm.