reviews

"ANNE OF GREEN GABBLES" was a fantastic read, it made me laugh and it made me cry, but my main nitpick about it was how there were so many emotionally charged scenes which had the potential to pack a punch but never going as far..!

the start was really good, it introduced the world and the characters pretty effectively, but by the end so many of the characters felt as thought were just thrown out the window..

i liked jesamine's conflicting portrayal. at one hand she's mean, she's stubborn, lost in her world and totally fixated on the idea of running away with a rich husband, but on the other - she is hurt and desperate, she hates the fate she has of being a shadow hunter when all she wishes is to be normal and a lady. she flip flops between liking tessa and being rude to her. she can be very vulnerable (like how she told her story with her dollhouse) or she can be condescending (looking at her with judgement). i also liked charlotte being a counter attack to jesamine's views of womanhood. but then there stops being any progress to her development, as it was going in the first half of the book, so you almost have a worriesome feeling she is meant to be black & white after all...

another weak point is the ending plottwist - it was obvious de quincy was not the real villain as the cast thought, but mortmein and especially nate's evil reveals were just so sudden and random. nat's betrayal was just a whole monologue of 'I've always been smarter than you thought, my Little Sister, why did you think auntie died after eating those chocolates i sent :smirk:' AAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

there is so much potential and hints of interesting ideas, unique worldbuilding, and then there's either stagnation, random reveals or just even killing off side characters with 4 lines of dialogue during the big battle for the sake of cheap dramatic effect make it feel so clumsy.

while there were some small things i enjoyed about this book (for example the contradiction of the all-knowing and mysterious Nightwings actually turning out to be carrion eaters, who live on a volcanic island, inhaling so much ash that they all have a perpetual cough and irritated eyes, i thought that was cool and a really effective contrast to the way they were portrayed in the previous 3 books), but as a whole it handled major plot points horribly!

most of the plot revolves around the Nightwings who have been kidnapping Rainwings (dragons that live isolated in the depths of the rainforests) and keep them imprisoned, dying of starvation and sickness in their cells, because Mastermind (the father of Starflight, the book's main character) wants to gather their venom and use it to craft bioweapons. it IS terrible, but the book not only hardly adresses it as such, but has Starflight offering help to the Nightwings when the island's volcano errupts at the end, saying that if Mastermind asks the Rainwing queen for forgiveness, she might let the Nightwings live in the forest with them...! even though they've been kidnapping, torturing and milking Rainwing venom for their own benefit! STARFLIGHT !!!!!!!

speaking of Starflight, another major storytelling drawback to this book was that the author failed him as a protagonist! there were so many flashbacks and dream sequences, and when there weren't any happening in the moment, Starflight was either thinking about Sunny, who he has a crush on (even though she's basically his adoptive sister (the books try to write it off that they aren't siblings because they're different races of dragons, but that makes no sense, they're literally hatchmates)) OR he is being hauled around by Fatespeaker, who has an identical personality to Sunny, a similarity that Starglight on-page notices! if it wasn't for her, Starflight would've moped in his bed the whole time, wishing someone would come resque him. he has character growth marked by the end where he finally DOES something, but i hardly think it was that good when he did not work on overcoming his fearfulness throughout the rest of the book!

at the very end, when they were escaping the tunnels that magically connect the island to the rainforest, lava falls onto Starflights eyes and he goes blind! it felt like it happened just for the shock value of it, because from what i've noticed, when the book focusing on a certain dragonet ends, we rarely hear from them!