I still love this series. ( )

Again, a great book! The characters and the world are really the strength of this series. I was quite glad to have re-read book 1, though, because at first, the world and magic system were a bit complicated. Fortunately, most about the world is explained in book 1, so book2 was easier to read. ( )

I got sucked so hard into this series that I ended up reading books two and three in an afternoon. I think that says something on its own. I gave up a whole day to this, rather than the hour or two I like to devote to reading.

It's funny, too, because the style of the series really annoys the heck out of me. I love the darkness of it -- and I don't mean that it's set in hell with demons and witches and whatever. The author really does deal with some incredibly dark issues, and that tends to fascinate me. Add into that the fact that the author is alarmingly good at making me laugh out loud at silly things.

I think the thing that gets me about things is how completely off-the-scale everything ends up being. I mean, the author sets her own scale and immediately broke it. And then broke it again. And then broke the broken break. And the time-spans involved! The author doesn't have anything against having someone be alive 50,000 years ago, or something happening 1,700 years ago, or whatever. It's unreal. I honestly wish she had taken a zero off of everything, just to make it a little more palatable.

Magic seems absolutely limitless; it really doesn't feel like there's any rules at all to Jaenelle's magic, like she's capable of absolutely anything.

The characters lack depth: the villains have nothing to redeem themselves, and there are hundreds if not thousands of people that fall into the category of totally, purely evil. The good guys are purely good, sometimes bumbling, often opinionated and full of knowing looks. I really think the only two characters that were fully developed were Jaenelle and Daemon, though by the end of book three I could add in Karla and Surreal.

And, and. Naming conventions. Really. Gah. Ugh. It's a truly amazing horde of hokey names: Saetan, Daemon, Lucivar, Cassandra, SaDiablo, Hayll, Hepsabah, Hekatah... the list goes on... and the rings of obedience? The hokey was nearly overpowering.

Yet, despite all that, I did enjoy this quite a bit. Your mileage may vary. ( )

So, basically identical to [b: Daughter of the Blood|47956|Daughter of the Blood (The Black Jewels #1)|Anne Bishop|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1400569100s/47956.jpg|353853] but with less sexual torture. Still pretty rapey, though It's 50 pages of some bullshit, 400 pages of little-to-no plot, then 50 pages of Jaenelle throwing down.

I mean, Tersa basically sums the whole shit up in the first book (and in the prologue no less): "She is coming. The Realm of Terreille will be torn apart by its own foolish greed. Those who survive will serve, but few will survive." And then it's a whole lot of words that amount to "bad people hate Jaenelle" and "good people love Jaenelle" and "Jaenelle is the most powerful witch on the block but the bad people don't believe it".

There is very little nuance, the magic system is kind of contradictory, I cannot make sense of the geography (is insanity is a literal place? I can't tell) and zero percent of the story is told from Jaenelle's point of view.

I may pick up the third book because I am a glutton for punishment, but The Others series is so good that I kind of can't believe this doesn't get better. ( )

Only gets worse from here. Now there are far too many characters, so they don't get expanded on. Power creep continues. Bad people get worse. Problems are more and more ridiculous. Pulp!

(I still love it.) ( )