Review: Froi of the Exiles by Melina Marchetta

I was debating whether or nor to write a review about this book, as I don't feel like I have too much to say about it. But I wrote a review for the first book in the series, so I figured I should write for the rest of the series as well.

Froi of the Exiles is the second book in the Lumatere Chronicles and it follows one of the lesser characters from the first book, Froi. He is off on a quest to another kingdom to seek revenge for events that unfolded before the story of the first book. The blurb on the back of the book is pretty vague, and I don't want to spoil anything, so I can't really go into great detail about the plot.

Again, I have to say that like the first book, this one just didn't really interest me. It took me a long time to finish the almost 600 pages. Longer than I would like to think it would usually take me. Because the story just didn't click for me. The characters were again uninteresting to me and I felt like there were so many different stories to keep up with that seemed wholly unconnected. To be fair, at the end of the book it did seem that some of the story lines started to intertwine, and that will (hopefully) hold true in the third book. But the main story line of Froi and Quintana was often interrupted by the differing story lines of Finnikin and Isaboe, Trevanion and Beatriss, Lucian and Phaedra and all their troubles. And while I like a bit of fleshing out of the minor characters there is a balance to be obtained with the main story line, and I felt like that balance wasn't really achieved. The main plot sometimes felt a bit disconnected, because we jumped back and forth between so many story lines.

As in the first book I didn't really connect with the characters in this one either. Their motives were hard to understand for me, and just when I thought I had someone figured out they would do the complete opposite of what I expected. While characters shouldn't be totally predictable, I just found them to be untrustworthy. It seemed like they would do something against the very grain of their nature, and I just couldn't understand why. But maybe that is just me. I am not a people person in real life, so maybe I'm not that great a people person in fictional life either.

To be fair I did start enjoying the book more towards the end, and I hope that enjoyment continues in the third and final book.


I gave it 3 stars on Goodreads.

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