Book Review: Glass Sword by Victoria Aveyard

Glass Sword Summary

If there’s one thing Mare Barrow knows, it’s that she’s different.

Mare Barrow’s blood is red—the color of common folk—but her Silver ability, the power to control lightning, has turned her into a weapon that the royal court tries to control.

The crown calls her an impossibility, a fake, but as she makes her escape from Maven, the prince—the friend—who betrayed her, Mare uncovers something startling: she is not the only one of her kind.

Pursued by Maven, now a vindictive king, Mare sets out to find and recruit other Red-and-Silver fighters to join in the struggle against her oppressors.

But Mare finds herself on a deadly path, at risk of becoming exactly the kind of monster she is trying to defeat.

Will she shatter under the weight of the lives that are the cost of rebellion? Or have treachery and betrayal hardened her forever?

The electrifying next instalment in the Red Queen series escalates the struggle between the growing rebel army and the blood-segregated world they’ve always known—and pits Mare against the darkness that has grown in her soul.

Glass Sword Review

Now that my finals are coming up, I’m finding it harder and harder to find time to read, or at least, to justify my “fun” reading when I should be reading French literature. You can imagine my annoyance then when a much-anticipated read turned out to be a disappointment.

Why, oh, why did I not listen to the reviews of Glass Sword and push this to the bottom of the TBR pile?

Unfortunately, Glass Sword by New York Times bestselling author Victoria Aveyard turned out to be a huge letdown and here’s why…

NB: review may contain spoilers for those who have not read Red Queen.

RELATED: Book Review: Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard

Glass Sword begins where Red Queen ends. The King is dead, Maven has seized the crown with the help of his mother and Mare and Cal are on the run. Although Cal is a silver blood and Mare, the Lightning Girl, is a new blood, and the two must work together to track down all the other new bloods before King Maven does.

If they can raise a new blood army, the Scarlet Guard, before he can, then they might just be able to overthrow him and take revenge for all he has done.

The main problem with this young adult book is that it’s just far too long and far too rambly. I could sum up what happens in this with a few, short sentences and there really isn’t any need to read all 440 pages of this novel.

Within about 50 pages of this book, I could begin to see why so many people disliked it. It was clear from the beginning that Mare’s mission was going to be to find all the new red bloods but each mission is the same. Plan, execute, run into difficulty, save the red.

I was expecting an action-packed sequel but there was no excitement and no suspense, just the same storyline over and over again. Understandably, this gets very tiresome and boring after a while. It also seems too convenient that each new blood recruited has a different sort of ability that happens to be exactly what they’re looking for. A little too easy if you ask me.

What’s more, Mare, who I greatly admired in Red Queen, completely changes in Glass Sword. Hardened by the events in book 1, her heart is shut off to the world and she becomes a sort of recruiting machine.

I was looking forward to a relationship developing between Mare and Cal but I was disappointed on that front. I simply could not identify with any of the characters in this story as they were all pretty emotionless and when they weren’t emotionless, they were angry.

You can certainly feel the rage coursing through each and every one of these characters but instead of appearing brave and determined, they merely seemed cold-hearted and vengeful.

All in all, I’m pretty frustrated that I wasted weeks reading Glass Sword when I could have been reading something much more exciting. As I have already said, the characters all seemed emotionless and the plot was boring and so I felt pretty emotionless and bored whilst reading it.

I’ll be reading reviews of King’s Cage now to see whether it’s worth finishing this series or not, though I almost certainly won’t be buying my own copy of this book – just in case.

Have you read this series? What are your thoughts on it? Is it worth continuing with King’s Cage?

Glass Sword is available on:
Amazon | Waterstones

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