It’s hard to play the enigmatic prince of romance when the object of your affections gets to watch you shit into the sea twice a day.
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar’s Key
After finishing the first book, Prince of Fools, over Christmas, I figured I’d be done with the trilogy by the end of January. Even though the first book meandered a bit, I was invested enough in Jalan and Snorri to push through and see what awaited them on the black ice.
The second book did not have the same energy as the first one and it took me a solid month to get through it. It suffered from a slow middle, which is the worst kind of slog. Actually, it suffered from a slow beginning as well. The point is, this book dragged and dragged. And it didn’t help that it was six hundred and fifty-three pages. You can’t expect someone to get to the 300+ page mark and still believe that it’s going to get better. That’s exactly what I did as I worked my way through this book in fits and starts over a four week period.
Not to give away anything from the first book, but Jalan, Snorri, and Tuttungu are continuing their adventures together. The biggest issue I had was not with our protagonist and primary POV character Prince Jalan. It was with Snorri. Snorri went through it™ in the first book and even earlier as told via the stories he shared with his companions over the campfire in book one. In book two, he takes on another rescue mission which involves opening the door to hell. Jalan goes along because he would die on his own a thousand times before making it home. As Snorri and Tuttungu offer him a way to get back to Vermillion, he takes the opportunity to flee the frozen north where they’d holed up for the winter.
One good thing this book had going for it was that instead of getting Snorri’s flashbacks, we got some of Jalan’s flashbacks, as told through some conveniently-timed memory spells. However, as Jalan’s story started to get interesting, we were plunged into some memory about his grandmother or magical great aunt and uncle. I’m all for some good backstory, but this book could have lost about two hundred pages and not suffered one bit.
The third and final book, The Wheel of Osheim, is watching me from my coffee table and I am not in the mood to spend another dark, cold month with Jalan and his crew. Maybe when the days get a bit longer and warmer I’ll return to the prince and the vikings. But for now, I need a break.
