Oathbound by Tracy DeonnMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book, the third in the young-adult Legendborn Cycle, succumbs to what could be called "creeping-pageism." That is, each successive book veers more and more into Brandon Sanderson-style brickbat territory, since this book is a whopping 642 pages.
Unfortunately, I don't think the ever-expanding length does the story any favors. The pacing is my major issue with this book, as so many of the scenes and conversations meander on and on for pages and don't need to. If you're invested in the characters, as I suppose I still am, you can give the book a bit of a side-eye and overlook this, but I can also envison a newbie to this series putting the book down in frustration. (Not to mention that you absolutely should not start the series with this book; it sorely needs a "the story so far" prologue. I don't know why series authors are so resistant to this.) It's not till the last quarter of the book that the story really gets going, and it took me several days to work my way through the previous three-quarters.
Which is too bad, as both the main protagonists Bree Matthews and Nick Davis go through some nice character development, and another main character, Selwyn Kane, becomes at the very least an anti-hero and possibly an all-out villain, due to a...rather frustrating plot twist in the book's final pages. The secret Arthurian society that rejected Bree, the reborn Arthur Pendragon, as their ruler, still has their racist and misogynist head up their ass, as they will not accept a young Black woman as their leader. This all seems to be setting up an explosive fourth book, but I really wish this one hadn't dragged so much to get there.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I didn't like this book nearly as much as the first two. I hope the series isn't getting into diminishing-returns territory, as the first book in particular was very affecting. We shall see.
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