#isibel

I recently finished reading Blade Breaker, it was good, great even, where the story starts to take form, nearly a satisfactory pay-off to the first book’s setup. This book gripped me to my seat for the majority of my read, from the clear chaos of each battle scene to the small conversations between the characters, it had my attention to the very end. I was starting to love this series and this new world Aveyard created.

However, there are flaws in this book, some are minor, like the pacing, the numerous names, and locations that at some point started to meld together in my memory (Though I would blame this flaw on myself, as I am not good with names nor geography). All of these shortcomings I could let slide, but one.

One character’s story and how they were handled in this series, did not sit well with me and that was Ridha.

Ridha’s arc felt off from the start.

In every story, there is an A plot, where we follow the main cast of characters from the protagonist to the antagonist. In Ridha’s case, her's fell in the B plot, where she is not part of the main plot but had an important role that would aid the series’ protagonist on their journey. Which made me expect that Aveyard would give her more things to do in the 2nd book.

Which she did. Off-screen.

With how few her scenes were, and how brief her interaction with the main characters was, her arc felt like a C plot. With her barely in the first book and in the 2nd book showing up at the beginning, disappearing for the majority of the book, then reappearing at the end just to be killed.

Did her death surprise me? No.

When Aveyard announced that a POV character was going to die. I already know it was Ridha. Because of how much she mattered to Dom, and how her death could push Isibel to protect the realm (as she was not able to do, with her own daughter) and how easily she could be removed from the story. Plus the fact that Realm Breaker’s main criticism was how long it was (it was indeed very long).

It made sense to remove Ridha from a writer’s point of view. Like trimming off the fat and getting a gut-wrenching death with it (similar to Shade in Glass Sword), killing two birds with one stone.

However. It failed. Hard.

As a reader, this felt more like watching someone gather quality ingredients, cooking it halfway (where it starts to look interesting but I’m still waiting for it to be good), then seeing it get thrown in the bin, just to get any emotion out of me. It did, it made me feel empty. I questioned how Aveyard did not wonder if she was being too obvious, careless, or even heavy-handed at wanting to hit us with a “tragic character death”. Not considering if she had written them well enough, if the readers cared for them enough, just as much as the surviving characters had, not even realizing that she already made a great sequel to this series.

Me: Oh no!

Also Me, 2 seconds later:

BRUH.

KiRa's Isibel !