My Rating: ★★★
Alina Starkov has never fit in anywhere, nor has she ever been particularly good at anything. Small, lonely, and permanently tired, she’s just barely scraping by as a mapmaker’s apprentice. When her regiment is tasked with going into the Shadow Fold, Alina is terrified of encountering the man-eating monsters who lurk within. Things take a turn for the worse when her best friend, Mal, is nearly fatally attacked. Alina does everything she can to save him, revealing a rare and dormant power that not even she knew she had. Now that it’s known she’s a Sun Summoner, she’s torn away from everything she’s ever known and forced to face the soul crushing pressure to become powerful enough to destroy the Shadow Fold all alone.
I loved the Netflix adaptation of this book along with another book from the Grishaverse, so I knew I had to read the books the series is based on. I rather enjoyed this book and thought it was interesting to see the differences between the book and live action adaptation. I will say that I like the Netflix adaptation more so far, but I did really enjoy this book and learning a little more about the world as well as the side characters.
I think Alina is a great character to follow, especially because she is lonely and struggles to truly believe in herself until toward the end of the book. I think she’s extremely relatable in that regard. Even though this is a fictional fantasy world, it depicts things such as self-confidence and growing into who you are as a person is not something that happens overnight is extremely realistic. I look forward to following Alina’s journey and seeing where the book takes us as the story continues.
While I enjoyed the book, I do think that it is lacking in descriptions. I wonder what I would’ve thought about it if I hadn’t already been supplied with a lot of information and visuals from the show. I know that, overall, I would’ve enjoyed it, but it was seriously lacking descriptions from time to time. There were a few times where I thought I somehow accidentally skipped a paragraph because an event was built up and then was over before it begun for me as a reader. Alina went through it and was either enjoying or struggling with the aftermath depending on the event, but I saw very little actually happening as a reader because it suddenly jumped from A to Z, leaving me feeling a bit confused. I hope that this is something that gets better as the series continues.
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