On Wings of Thunder

2.5

It's incredibly maddening because the setting had promise - dragons and angels and reincarnation. But the execution was done poorly. Shallow characters, a rather unexciting plot, a shoddy romance and incomplete world building. We have our main characters, Trystan and Asagoroth, who basically spent three quarters of the book working out their (underdeveloped) romance and one quarter of anticlimactic showdowns. Everyone except for the main characters and Annalise(Trystan's sister) was portrayed as one-dimensional villains. And even the three characters mentioned above didn't have any character development either. It seemed odd that all opposition to Trystan and Asagoroth's relationship was automatically shut down simply because of the death of Trystan's father.

The extremely strong power of Asagoroth felt really convenient (as convenient as the sudden discovery of how angels and demons all have a complementary mate to make Trystan and Asagoroth's relationship seem more normal/progressive) as Asagoroth could simply appear and he would defeat any enemy(boring). Not to mention the normal demons were barely mentioned until the very end for the mate thing which made it feel like the existence of demons was just a tool to complete the ending. Finally, the idea of “unchosen” people of the angel world was half-baked. Trystan was originally an “unchosen” and a lot of his thoughts was about how he felt like he didn't belong, but once Asagoroth came along the “unchosen” were all forgotten. If the theme of outcasts was meant to be depicted in the book it wasn't done well.

Also, how random was the dream of meeting with Roland?? I get the reincarnation thing but the dream just felt cringey.