#TeamSev or #TeamKaia?

I was really hoping, going into this, that the love triangle wouldn't overshadow the entire plot. I was right to be worried.

Whether you like this book or not will depend entirely on how you feel about Sev. If you're #TeamSev, you'll love this book. Buy it, no questions asked. If you're on the fence about him, or if you dislike him, you're in for a rough ride because he's a POV character now. The story spends a LOT of time in his perspective, and not much of anything happens in his chapters.

So, Maren...

In Shatter The Sky, Maren was a scrappy protagonist who prevailed because she was caring, daring and a little naieve. In Storm The Earth, Maren is The Special, who prevails because she has a genetic talent. At every stage she makes rash, terrible decisions in the face of extremely sensible advice from Kaia. Similarly, Sev spends his time bumbling about, making terrible decisions and being rewarded for it because of who he was born rather than because of anything he actually does. In fact, if you examine his actions you could be forgiven for thinking that Sev is one of the antagonists of the novel. The text treats both characters as heroes who, yes, occasionally do bad things, but they're vindicated in the end.

At first, I thought RKW was actually doing something really clever with Maren's character. In the wake of the events of Shatter The Sky, Maren has concluded that she's always right and that her half-baked plans always work out, so she doesn't need to listen to anyone else. I thought her character arc in Storm The Earth was going to be about her learning the balance between assertiveness and humility. Nope.

It might not have been a problem for both Sev and Maren to be terrible people if the story was going to do something with that idea... but the story doesn't think they're terrible, so neither character really has a plot arc.

Shatter The Sky had personal stakes (Maren wanted to get Kaia back), whereas Storm The Earth has epic stakes (freeing the dragons and toppling the emperor). That might be your jam, it very much wasn't mine.

Storm the Earth isn't terrible. I read it all the way through to the end, although I was definitely flagging in the last couple of hours. As I say, if you're #TeamSev you'll probaly get on with the story great. Catherine Ho continues to be pretty good. I didn't like Ramon De Ocampo's Sev performance but I don't know how much of that was just hating Sev.

It was nice to have unapologetic Bi representation, but it would have been nice to have that without the love triangle which weighed the story down like a bucket full of bricks tied to its feet.

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