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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1000 Places to See Before You Die 20 - Acropolis, Athens, Greece

Image
You cannot go to Athens and not go to the Acropolis. It is a staple on any sightseeing tour and is likely to be crawling with tourists at any given point in time. Still, it is definitely worth it to brave the masses and see the fortified citadel above the city of Athens for yourself.   The word acropolis means the highest point of the city, and there are a number of these acropoleis scattered throughout Greece, but the one in Athens is so well known that it is simply called “The Acropolis”.  There is evidence that the area on the rocky outcropping overlooking the city was inhabited already in the 4th millennium BC, but it was Pericles who started construction on the many famous buildings in the 5th century BC. These famous buildings include the Parthenon, probably the most iconic of the buildings, the Propylaea, the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike. These buildings were all seriously damaged in 1687 AD when the Venetians had sieged the city and used th
Read more

Review: Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Image
This is the first book in a series, but I have no intention of continuing on with this series. The plot evolves around two young people, Amy and Elder. They live on a spaceship that has left Earth to find a new planet to populate. Amy was part of the cryogeniccaly frozen people on board, meant to be woken up upon arrival and using their skill set to populate the new planet. Elder, meanwhile, is part of the population that has been keeping the ship running whilst it travels towards its destination.  One day Amy is woken up from her frozen sleep and now she must learn to live on this spaceship, without her parents, slowly learning the culture and the secrets of this ship. It turns out there is an abundance of mysteries on board this ship, like who is waking up (and killing) the frozen people, who is the mysterious deceased Elder, what is the current Eldest up to and what’s with the “crazy” people and their medication.  Eventually all these mysteries are solved, but is
Read more

Reading the classics: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The book The book first appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, and the year after it was released as a book in a revised edition. As I am working on this post, I discover that the book is not necessarily considered a classic….great choice for the kick-off post for the series then! However, in my experience, it does usually appear on “classics” lists, so I am going to count it! At the time of the first publication in 1890 it was considered immoral, by a lot of people, but Wilde took offense to that and defended his story. When it was published in book form though, he had changed some things and added a preface, that stated that books cannot be moral or immoral, only well written or badly written.  The author Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was Wilde’s full name, but he later changed it to Oscar Wilde because, as he said, the name was too long for someone who was going to be famous. He was born on October 16th 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. He went to Trinity Co
Read more