The final installment of Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass series is Kingdom of Ash. At 980 pages, this is an epic book. To be honest, it was a little bit too long. But it was a fitting end to a great series.
Because this is a review of the last book of a series, there are spoilers for the first six books.
At the beginning of the book, things look hopeless. Aelin is in an iron box trapped by Maeve (whom we now know is Valg), all of our protagonists are separated, and the forces of evil have their armies everywhere. How are they going to find Aelin and fight off all these forces? I don’t think I’m really spoiling much to say that they’re going to eventually win. An ending where Maeve and Erawan win and everyone dies would have everybody shaking their fists, vowing to never read another Sarah J. Maas book again.
Overall, I enjoyed the book. It was interesting to see the twists and turns, and find out how Ms. Maas was going to pull the characters out of all the messes they got themselves into. There were several situations where things looked really bleak. Sadly, not everybody will survive. In the end, there was no irrational “oh the gods came down and saved everyone” end either. The way the conflict was resolved was quite satisfying.
A Really Long Book
I like big books as well as the next person, but Kingdom of Ash might have been a little bit too long. There were too many long, detailed battle scenes. While I enjoy history, I don’t particularly care for reading a lot of battle scenes. They can easily become too much for me. I gave this book four stars on Goodreads – pretty much the reason it lost a star was the length. Partly due to the battle scenes.
Kingdom of Ash is very detailed. I found myself referring to the map several times while reading this book. There were characters that show up in this book that we haven’t seen since Throne of Glass. There is so much going on in this book that someday I may have to binge-read this series again just to remember everything that happened.
To give an example of how long this book is, there’s about 100 pages of this book where stuff happens after the climax of the book: coronations, wedding talk, that sort of thing. Yes, I want to find out what happens to the characters afterwards, but for 100 pages? After already reading nearly 900 pages? It was a little bit much.
Conclusion
I liked this book. There were a lot of great characters and subplots, but the length was just a bit too much, even for someone that reads a lot of long books. If you’re going to make your fiction book nearly 1000 pages, make sure they’re all necessary.