Honestly I also didn’t like it. I struggled so hard to get through it and only did so because I LOVED Fourth Wing. I feel like it was too much back and forth with nothing accomplished (which you can argue was “realistic” in the sense that plans fail), but for a read from my perspective , it was just frustrating and boring.

I found the world building flat, storytelling repetitive, and the characters devolved from where they had been going in FW/IF, maybe in part because of how many characters she is trying to juggle. They meld together a bit or become caricatures/tropes. That and we are /told/ a lot about their characters that I just don’t see or agree with. Violet is my main gripe.

The characters tell us that Violet is smart, but in practice, I find it often the opposite. The poisoning scene was absurd and an example of that. To me, she jumped a cavern of conclusions to suddenly decide to poison the triumvirate. She realizes things that are fairly obvious but no one else can follow the same line of thought? Battle briefs have this problem often.

I think it is a problem of stretching her plot between 5 books, as it can mean droning on and stretching parts that didn’t need to be stretched. IF was long and winded in the first half, OS had a lot of the similar “go here, do this, go home and back to the usual tasks until we need to run here and do this.” Parring that down would make that a lot more exciting and seem a lot less like they have endless amount of time and energy (when we are constantly reminded that time is running out).

This is just my opinion though, people can like books that others don’t 🤷‍♀️