/lit/ - Literature

Wings of Fire 9: Talons of Power

I wasn't sure I'd like reading about turtle because he's too powerful for his own good as an animus. Indeed, the animus power does need more limitations in general. Darkstalker and Anemone throw around spells as fast as a greeting. However, Turtle doesn't use his animus power flippantly. He's careful and timid and i can think of ten ways he could have trivialized this story in as many minutes. He was just being used as a tool so the reader can see what's going on around Darkstalker. I didn't feel like he grew whatsoever by the end of the book. I really, really wanted to love him because he was awesome in the other books as part of the friend group and I was very disappointed with him. There was so much he could've done but he's mostly static.

Tui's particular brand of humour continues - though more muted than Book 8. Turtle is not the most exciting of protagonists as he is a self-admitted coward and generally passive wishing to stay in the background. It's strong trait for him to carry as a character but makes for slower reading than Peril’s book. Resultantly, I found the book bit slow, especially in the middle/end where my interest meandered a bit. At first, I loved the spying, but after a while it just felt...pointless. Like, if he had been axed out of this book, it wouldn't really have affected anything.

Darkstalker is frankly the real main character here with turtle keeping hidden the whole way and he continues to be one of the most devious and best-written villain characters in general I've seen in a long time. He's this sticky oily kind of evil that thinks he's charming and lovable and a generous guy everyone should like, but he's just scary underneath. Maybe he's just controlling. He does these horrific petty, and vast reaching vindictive acts that everyone tells him are bad and it all just washes off him like water to a duck . . .. He's a black pit of malice and pride that's willfully ignorant of itself like a scorpain that stings the frog and denies it would ever do such a thing in one breath and then says the frog deserved it in the next.

As much as I love the new books (6, 7, 8, and 9), the dragons in them have too much power. There seems to be too much focus on special powers (mindreading, fire scales, animus magic) rather than sheer characterization. I liked that about the first books, the dragonets had to rely on cleverness and each other rather than powers. I'm hoping the 10th book will be about a powerless dragon (and a little searching shows the pov character should be Qibli, whom I preferred over Kinkajou anyway).

Normally I like special-powered characters. I'm not sure why it bothers me in this series Maybe it's that the animus power doesn't have enough limitations and overshadows the other powers too much.

3.8/5