Welcome to my Reread of Jenn Lyons' epic fantasy series, A Chorus of Dragons! This series, whose fifth and final book is scheduled to come out in April, began in 2019 with The Ruin of Kings and has since popped out three other epic fantasy doorstoppers: 2019's The Name of All Things, 2020's The Memory of Souls, and 2021's The House of Always. And since book 2 (The Name of All Things), this has been easily one of my favorite series over the past few years, doing some really interesting things with the genre, and featuring a set of major and minor characters who are really enjoyable, fun, and interesting - to go along with some great dialogue. I've reread books 2-4 of this series quite a bunch, and figured I'd do a blog reread of each book prior to my review of Book 5, which I got an advance copy of through NetGalley.
That means we're starting with Book 1: The Ruin of Kings, the first book in the series, and the only one I had never before done a full reread of prior to this point. And that's because, as I put in my original review of that book (see HERE), I didn't particularly love that book, and wasn't sure if I was even going to continue with the series after that. And I wasn't alone in that opinion, no less than 3 other SF/F fans I've spoken to who tried book 1 managed to bounce off of it, which is a shame because Book 2 is so so good - and honestly, thanks to the recap of book 1 that starts that book, you could probably start there. So I've actually advised people to do just that.....but well, Book 4 in the series, The House of Always, ,returns a bunch of characters from book 1, and even without remembering them too well, I felt like I probably wanted to do a reread before the finale.
Does The Ruin of Kings still stand out as a problem for the series after reading books 2-4? Or was its issues necessary for the rest to hit the highs? I wanted to find out, and that's what I'll be discussing in this post, after the jump:
SPOILER WARNING BEFORE THIS POINT
When this series is at its best, its jumping between many characters' perspectives, covering at least our main four protagonists - Kihrin, Teraeth, Janel, and Thurvishar - in their various attempts to deal with the threats to the people they care about (and eventually the whole world). We get to see from multiple perspectives the events, get to know multiple characters, and get to really enjoy them developing in various ways, and to see them preserving repeatedly against impossible odds. Also some hilarious reincarnation shenanigans. In the end, we wind up with book 4 featuring 13 characters with various plotlines of their own, all of which I really got to care about. But still, even in book 2 the story follows two different major characters from start to end, with a number of side characters getting major development alongside them.
Which is what makes The Ruin of Kings suffer by comparison is that we only are seeing things from Kihrin's perspective for the most part - some of Talon's narrated chapters are told from the perspectives of those around Kihrin, but we rarely stay with them for long (I guess we get to know Galen in this fashion). And the book splits Kihrin's timeline in two, so we essentially get to see him grow and develop twice, instead of getting one long character arc, so it takes forever for him to grow into an interesting character instead of just a whiny guy messed with by fate. And like the book's selling point was that Kihrin was going to be fated to turn into the bad guy rather than a savior, but well in this book Kihrin just acts like a hero, so while the tagline isn't WRONG it doesn't actually describe Kihrin's personality or how he could be interesting. By Books 3-4, Kihrin is a lot more interesting, even by Book 2 as he interacts with Janel in the framing story, but those interesting traits come from his reactions and relationships to other characters we care about.
But the problem with this book is that split narrative also prevents us from really getting to know the interesting side characters - for example, Teraeth is a MAJOR character and Kihrin spends FOUR years with him to the point where he'd call him his "best friend" next book, and will have developed more romantic feelings for him, but because of the way the plot works, the majority of their growing relationship occurs during time skips,, which makes it hard to really get to know or care about Teraeth here. So Kihrin has to do everything on his own in terms of selling the story and he really can't at this point.
And well, then there's the plot, which also.....well, could have almost certainly been done better. There are essentially two plotlines going on here:
This book's main arc: Gadrith (aided by Darzin and the Gaeshed Thurvishar) searches for the Stone of Shackles for some unknown purposes - later revealed to be to switch places with Sandus, obtain Urthaenriel, and become the prophesied destroyer of the world;
The series' main arc: Relos Var searches for Kihrin, for the purposes of manipulating the prophecies for some unknown purpose, as he opposes the gods, who Kihrin discovers Var once created.
The two plotlines are sort of intersected - both Gadrith and Relos Var care about the prophecies, and Var is in fact opposed to Gadrith sort of, but Var is clearly the greater threat and his concerns are far greater than whatever Gadrith is doing in Quur. And yet the series essentially uses Kihrin's narrated plotline to introduce Var midway through and the greater main arc....only to then completely skip away from Var to feature Kihrin getting back to Quur to face off with Gadrith and Darzin. It's like Lyons felt like she needed to introduce the plot point for the sake of the series, and then once she did she then dropped it entirely as if she had marked off a checklist.
That's actually the feel for a lot of this book - Janel's appearance in the afterlife, seemingly out of nowhere, is similar (Janel introduction? Check), as is Kihrin's finding Urthaenriel randomly in the Culling Fields (Ruin of Kings found and now in our hero's hands? Check), and bit player introductions for characters who will show up later like Kalindra and Sheloran, etc. There's some good stuff here, but it very much feels perfunctory and not cohesive, which just hinders the story from really becoming compelling. The next books in the series won't have that problem, with the stories featuring one main arc and introduced long term elements arising naturally throughout, so you never really feel like you're watching an author just set things up.
So yeah, I was able to enjoy the Ruin of Kings more this time around because rereading it explained to me some references in the later books I had forgotten. But it's still a problem book for the series, as it's too disjointed in trying to setup a short term plotline vs a long term one to develop its characters in truly interesting ways. It doesn't help also that despite the hints at attraction between Kihrin and Teraeth, the story takes place entirely in queer-phobic Quur, which also feels kind of lame compared to what will come next to make this epic fantasy tremendously queer and exciting in those possibilities as well.
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