The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

I went into this one on quite a high from binging the first two books in this series, but this installment definitely had a hard time finding momentum in the plot, and I actually didn't like that we added Raihn's POV, as I honestly felt like it really didn't give us anything we couldn't have understood through Oraya's eyes, and in fact kind of just diluted the connection with Oraya's POV and made the book feel much more incongruous. As these are pretty large elements of the book, it definitely brought he enjoyment level down consistently for me throughout the entire thing unfortunately.

I did continue to enjoy learning more about this world and the politics, and I thought the effort put towards Oraya's very complicated grief was very successful – but those things weren't enough to blow my mind all on their own, and I definitely found my mind wanting to wander through at least half of the pages. The final ~20% was definitely the strongest chunk of the book though, so we ended on a pretty solid note for this story. So: it was just okay, but I am still very excited for the next book!