King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo
Hello Books Lovers,
today we return to the world of Grisha thanks to Mondadori who brings to Italy the new duology of the Grishaverse, King of scars, the first of a duology that will end in April with Rule of wolves.
I knew this was a duology dedicated to Nikolai, I did not expect to meet old protagonists like Nina Zenik, and above all I did not expect she would have chapters from her point of view. Maybe now I understand where the idea for Netflix to merge Six of Crows and shadiw and Bones came from because that’s exactly what is done in King of Scars.
Obviously the characters present are those characters who have not had a happy ending and who deserve it. Among them we have Nina, Nikolai, Zoya, Tolya, David and Genya. Finding all these characters was completely unexpected and I liked this story more.
I have to be honest, there were a lot of things I didn’t remember from previous books, including the fact that Matthias had died in Crooked Kingdom. Characters such as Alina, The Darkling are mentioned. King of scars is one of those books that can be read even without having read the previous sagas, but mentions to old characters are not lacking. But at the end, I read Six of Crows before I read the Shadow band Bones trilogy.
Now I’ll say something that will probably make everyone hate me, but Leigh Bardugo has never been one of my favorite authors. I have never been able to completely love her books, despite the fact that I love the stories, and I love the way she characterizes her characters, giving each one a different personality, in the narration I have always found less interesting parts, in the sense of boring, either heavy, or simply too much for the story that was being told.
With this book the situation was no different there were moments when reading left me a bit like not totally convinced, and reading books in pdf with a very small font like the one used by mondadori does not help, but the positive side is that I liked most of the book, I really enjoyed Nikolai’s development.
Nikolai is facing a big problem. During the last battle against the Darkling his creatures did something to the King and now, every night, he transforms into a bloodthirsty creature that controls him and gets stronger every night. It can be said that one of the main goals of this book will be to find a cure for this problem. Nikolai is the King, he cannot risk being seen by his subjects, already risks being assassinated by his opponents every day.
One of the other problems is that the Grisha are persecuted, they cannot show their abilities to anyone, risking death. Nina’s task with other envoys of the king is precisely to infiltrate and take as many Grisha as possible to a safe place. And as if that were not enough, after the death of the Darkling, many of his supporters have come in the open to create problems.
If there are usually chapters that I prefer more than others, in terms of POV, this time it didn’t happen. The chapters are there from the point of view of Nikolai, Zoya and Nina, and I enjoyed reading from the point of view of all three. Apart from a few negative sides, and the various negative reviews scattered around the web, I liked this book enough, so much so that I decided to give it almost 4 full stars.
I look forward to seeing you here on April 19th for the review of the final volume of this duology. There are still some things that need to happen, I can’t wait.
