I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Ash Princess tells the story of Thora, a girl destined to be queen in a country enslaved by an evil tyrant. It follows her fight for freedom and the difficulties she encounters when forced to make a choice between her people and her friend.
To me this is your YA bread and butter, and it follows every predictable trope known to the genre. You have the typical evil villain, determined to keep our heroine downtrodden. You have the suppressed heroine, destined for greatness, who doesn’t know her own strength. And you have the obvious love interest and a weird love triangle of sorts between childhood friends. It’s written well and it’s entertaining, but unfortunately it was all too predictable for me and it’s all been done before. There was nothing unique or different about the story - especially if you’ve read a lot of YA fantasy.
As stated, I found the villain very obvious with no subtlety to him at all. He’s one tone with no hidden depth. He’s just a tyrant. The other secondary characters are a little more complex. In particular I liked the Kaiserin with her hidden intelligence and all seeing eyes, and Artemisia, who gets some of the best lines with her straight talking personality. At times I thought these characters were woefully under used though, as the story instead chose to concentrate on our protagonist Theo/Thora, her ‘friend’ Cress, Prinz Soren and childhood friend Blaine.
I found Cress to be extremely vapid and ornamental, especially early on in the story. She’s interested only in clothes and gossiping - all the while treating Thora like some kind of pet. Their relationship irritated me, as Thora is so obviously conditioned to see her as a friend when in reality she’s being incredibly naive and repeatedly manipulated to be compliant. This results in Theo making excuses for Cress’s behaviour, even when it’s painfully obvious that what she’s doing is wrong.
With regards to Soren, Blaise and Theo the only aspect of their relationship I enjoyed was the subtle courting and flirting in the beginning between Soren and Theo. Theo’s manipulation of Soren demonstrates her inner strength to get what she wants when she puts her mind to it, and it had the potential to go a long way. However, half way through the book Soren disappears on a mysterious trip and we don’t see him again until near the of the novel, wasting so much possible tension and character development. By the time he appears again I’d lost interest. The interactions between Blaine and Theo I found, for the most part, awkward and a little forced. I would have preferred more Soren and Theo, due to the complex nature of their relationship.
A lot of the novel is quite slow in pace, with endless internal dialogue devoted to inner turmoil and angst from Thora. There’s little action, just endless talking about what the right thing to do is without actually doing it. I also found some of the plot points confusing. Theo repeatedly states that the Kaiser needs her alive and that she’s valuable, yet at one point he’s willing to marry her off to a duke known for abusing and killing his wives as if she’s worthless. It’s never really explained why she would be of any use to the Kaiser alive, especially as he’s so keen to kill everyone else who threatens his rule.
Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be picking up the sequel to this, unless reviews suggest a drastic change in pace and character development. It suffers too much from a deja vu feeling of every YA novel before it. This is a shame because it had a lot of potential to develop some unique characters in the genre, but fell a little short in execution for me.
- 3 stars
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