Siege and Storm

We continue right where we left off in Shadow and Bone in the second instalment of the Grishaverse series, following the adventures of Alina the Sun Summoner and Mal right after they’d escaped from The Darkling in the first book.

It’s worth noting that I’m reading this series after the Six of Crows duology and after watching the Shadow and Bone Netflix series which follows the main plot of this Grishaverse trilogy while blending in elements and characters from Six of Crows into the plot.

Siege and Storm is difficult to review for me because it leaves me quite conflicted. This is a series that I overall feel is epic and I thought the TV show was truly awesome, capturing the best parts of both Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows. But when you read the literature behind the show, you really start to realize why they felt it necessary to blend the characters from Six of Crows into the plot to make it really shine.

That isn’t to say Siege and Storm was dull by any means. Broadly it was an enjoyable read. But having read SoC, it’s also quite clear to me how far the author, Leigh Bardugo, developed as a writer between this series and her later work in terms of being able to write characters that I felt truly had depth.

You saw glimpses of her budding ability to write intriguing characters in this book when Nikolai burst onto the scene. Nikolai was truly the savior of this book, as his character was interesting and as a reader you always had that desire to analyse what he was doing and attempt to determine his true intentions, which were rarely on display through his smooth words and carefully choreographed façade.

The only other character that comes close to holding similar mystique is The Darkling himself, but we unfortunately saw precious little of him in Siege and Storm as the book mostly focuses on Alina’s journey and development.

I feel this is probably a book that would have benefited greatly from telling the story from split perspectives. It would have been really cool to see what The Darkling and his crew was up to during the middle part of this book, which would have kept things a little more interesting than what we actually got which was largely day-to-day monotony of Alina Starkov and her off-on relationship with Mal which I found frustrating to read at times due to how things play out.

There’s a lot of YA drama and tensions here that I personally found annoying and feel the book would have been better off without. I found the way Mal’s character was written here most frustrating of all, and actually detracted from the high-stakes feeling of the overall plot-line as we kept returning to some petty relationship squabbles and drama. The literary real-estate could have been used for something better like, I don’t know, describing the rate of grass growth outside the Little Palace.

Due to not having that broad range of perspectives and most of the action largely being front and back loaded in the book, the middle did drag a little at times especially given The Darkling’s lack of participation in most of it. The world building was cool and all, but nothing much actually happened. I think the book could easily have been 100 pages less.

I’ll definitely be reading the final book in the series, Ruin and Rising. I find the Grishaverse overall a great fantasy universe and I already suspect we’ll see a lot more of The Darkling and Nikolai in Book 3 and plenty of action, so I’m anticipating a fairly epic finale.

As for this middle book in the series, though, I can only muster a high three but not quite four star rating. Nikolai saved the book as did some of the early and late chapters, but the middle dragged in places and the other characters were limited in their ability to truly capture my interest.