 Hey guys, it's Liana, and I'm here to date a rant about Red Sister. I figure, you know, just come out and say that's what we all know that I'm here to do. I'm sure my thumb male said so. So yeah, Red Sister by Mark Lawrence, which is universally loved, particularly by female readers, and I expected to love it. I do own a physical copy of it, but it is not at my new apartment. It is not here. So I can't hold it. I wish I could hold it because I really especially like holding books during like dedicated reviews wrap-ups I don't really care about. But during a dedicated review, I like to like, if it's one I love, I love to cuddle it. And if it's one I hate, I love to flop it around. But nothing to flop today, unfortunately. I have the ebook, the audiobook, and a physical book, and I hate it. I have been reading this book for about two years, and I finally finished it. So I'm so, so glad that it's over, that it's done, that I never ever have to return to that world again. I am sad that I didn't end up liking it, because I held out hope for so long that like, eventually I would love it. I would, I would be with it, and I would be with all those people that whose tastes I tend to agree with who love it, and it never happened. And so some people tell me, okay, yes, the beginning is hard to get into, but push through. And I was like, okay. And then I was well past the beginning, and someone was like, okay, but you're listening to an audiobook. I don't think the audiobook's that good, you should switch to physical. So I switched to physical, and I hate it and still, oh my god, it made zero difference. It wasn't the beginning being bad, it wasn't the audiobook narrator being bad, it's just the book. There's no excuses, it's just the book. And I Like Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence. So I know it's not just that this author is not for me, although like I'm glad that I read Prince of Thorns, because after Red Sister I probably wouldn't have tried other books by him, or I might have, but very hesitantly. But I really, really liked Prince of Thorns, and the like couple pages that I read of Prince of Fools, it's other series I also enjoyed. So it's not that Mark Lawrence's writing isn't for me. So having read Prince of Thorns, like I think I started Red Sister first, but then hated it, and then picked up Prince of, picked up and finished Prince of Thorns very quickly in the middle of my two-year reading of Red Sister. But having read Prince of Thorns, if someone told me, hey, this author who wrote this that you liked wrote another book that is female-centric about like assassin nuns, I would 100% believe that that would be one of my favorite books ever. And it's not. It's so bad. So like I guess I'm supposed to say Disclaimers. This is what got me in trouble with Way of Kings, because I didn't say enough times that this is me, and this is my opinion, and whatever. When I read books, when I review books, I think, and everyone is always subjective about themselves, I think I do a pretty good job of distinguishing between what is a matter of taste and what I consider to be a structural flaw. Like if you were to be assessing or reviewing an article of clothing, there is whether or not this fashion is to your taste, but there is also what the quality of the material is used. So they are two different things to assess, and one is subjective and one is a matter of taste, and the other is more objective, is more, okay, you could, I guess you could say it's a matter of taste. Some people like scratchy, badly made things, but in general, you're like, this is of poor quality. The construction isn't, it's not well constructed. So I don't feel like I need to say this is my opinion when I'm addressing things that I think are structural problems that are not my taste. They are things like things being poorly made. So whatever. Again, people, there's, there's many reasons why people attacked me for Way of Kings, but I didn't say enough times that this is just, I seriously doubt that if I had said this is just my opinion like 10 million more times, that would have changed anything, but just in case, this is my opinion about Red Sister. And if you disagree with me, that is your right back to ranting about it. So what shocked me about Red Sister was its poor construction, and there was a plenty of things about it that were also a matter of taste, which I will get to. And that's the utterly subjective part of it. But I was shocked by how, how info dumpy the, the dialogue was, how poorly paced it was, how there were multiple instances where the sentence was poorly constructed. It's the only thing I can say. And again, that surprised me because I read Prince of Thorns and I didn't feel that way, where it's just, it was like clunky and it was poorly organized sentences, poorly organized dialogue. And things, sentences that were difficult to, to follow, if that makes sense, where like they're explaining a thing that's happening, or how a thing loves describing something, whatever. And the sentences were just not very readable, which I found shocking. Overall, now, well, I guess we'll just move into a matter of taste. Okay, so it's assassin nuns. If you know nothing about Red Sister, it's about assassin nuns. And that is accurate. And that is entirely what it's about. It's not like you think it's about that, but it's actually about other things that is what it's about. That I, it's absolutely true. Well, almost every character in the book is a female. I did not feel that this book was a book for women. And I, it's not because I want all the women in it to be good or great, or even likable. But the depiction of women was, it made me dislike women. It made me dislike the little girls who, because you follow Nona, who's a little girl, in the beginning. And, and you follow her, she's your main POV character. So she's very, very small, a child in the beginning of the book. And then by the end of the book, she's older adolescents, like verging on teens. She's not a teen yet. And so her and her group of other schoolmates at the assassin nun school, like the depiction of these caddy children, these caddy girls. And then the nuns themselves, who are their instructors or their mentors, who are leading this school, they're caddy in a very, like, the mature version of the same petty caddiness. And the politics of the world, and the way that the dialogue is handled, where you have this, it's almost that kind of heavy handedness that I complain about for historical fiction, where you have a female character in a historical fiction novel who's malding off and being a hashtag feminist, in that really, again, overt way, where it's lacking subtlety. And in those instances, it's more the anachronism of it that bothers me, although I do find it obnoxious without anachronism. And here, because it, I mean, it's a fantasy world. So you can't say it's anachronistic, because it is whatever the author says it is. But it was just so, again, heavy handed, or the characters would just, it was like the conversation had been invented and constructed for the sole purpose of giving the nun the opportunity and the excuse to soapbox about, like, how badass they are as women, and how they hate men until men can't be as great as them. And it's that brand of feminism that I find so distasteful, because I don't understand why you need to belittle and to be so when it's done, okay, when it's done humorously, like in stand-up comedy or a sitcom or something. And it's a joke. I think it's funny. But in a more serious context, that kind of man hating that's so, it's just so petty to me. And I don't care for it. And the book was filled with that where these petty and lying and deceitful and catty and gossipy, horrible girls and women just talking about their superiority when it comes to physical things, when it comes to intelligence, when it comes to being the vampiest badasses around. It was just so heavy handed all the time. And it's written by a man. So it came, it came across to me as kind of almost like a man being like, well, how, how I imagine feminism to be is what this book is gonna be. You know what I mean? It was trying so hard to be feminist. And I feel like when your entire book is just filled with female characters, you don't have to do that. I mean, honestly, you never have to do that because I don't like it, but it was just so heavy and off-putting and not interesting. And then that too. So the main character, no, no, she's your main P.O.B. character. And she was dull and quite two-dimensional, frankly. She was an unreliable narrator because she's a liar. And she was so bizarre to me, so extremely bizarre because her thought process on things, she was simultaneously so absurdly naive and childish, even for her young age, while also, like within the same page, was philosophizing in a way that you'd expect someone who's 80 years old and traveled the world to be. And that she was simultaneously a five-year-old and an 85-year-old. So she was no way believable to be the actual age that she is. She didn't seem like a real character to me, so I couldn't really latch onto her. I couldn't really identify with her. I couldn't really go into this story with her or root for her in any way, because I don't even feel like I know her. I feel like she was a vessel, but the author, like she changed from scene to scene to just be whatever the author needed her to be to tell the part of the world and the part of the story that he wanted to do. And there were so many instances where that was definitely what was occurring, like without a doubt, because Nona would observe something, or Nona would recently have had an experience that would be life-altering perspective shaping a thing like that. But her internal monologue, like she'd be in some scene where like she's like wondering if she can trust somebody, and then out of nowhere she starts, she's a child mind you, she starts all of a sudden thinking herself that like, but perhaps, you know, she wondered if the world is like this really, and if people are like this thing that she had experienced, or like this magic that had occurred, and if people are like this as well, and that things aren't always what they seem, and just like, she's like goes off on this like philosophical tangent. She's like 12, and she's in the middle of some kind of high-stakes situation, and she's suddenly, the only reason she's thinking about it is because the author decided that the author wanted to philosophize about this for a second, or point out something about this world. And the only way to do that, I guess, is to have Nona think to herself, is the world this way. But it, that's not believably what Nona would be thinking about right then and there. So it's really, again, heavy-handed. It's just stuck in there because the author wanted to say it. The only way to say it was to have this like, you've written this paragraph of your own personal magical world's philosophy, but you stick at the beginning of it, Nona wondered, and then you stick in your philosophy, and then Nona goes back to paying attention to what the fuck is going on around her. And it was just constantly stuff like that, where scenes were happening, conversations were happening, like lessons in the classes were happening, where it just felt not like a story, not like what these characters would really do, not what these characters would really say, not what they'd really be like. Every single scene just felt crafted to create the opportunity and excuse for the author to say what the author wanted to say, for the author to do the world building that he wanted to do, and I can't get into a story like that. I can't. Because, of course, I mean, that's the trick of it. If you're doing world building and you're doing magic building and you're doing all that, you can't just get your characters to just come up with reasons to say those things. Your characters lead your story, and if I don't believe your characters are real, then I will not give a shit about the philosophy of your world or the magic of your world or the hatred of your world if your characters do not feel real to me. Now the prose is definitely better, and the magic system and world building is definitely more original than what was like in Malice, because I complain that Malice too just felt like a bunch of like contravences and poorly executed exposition shoved into dialogue where it wasn't appropriate. Red Sister had that going on, but credit where it's due, the prose was better, this magic was more interesting, the world building was more creative. It was just delivered so badly, which made it tragic to me because there was so much potential to Red Sister that I wish I liked it, but again the characters don't feel like characters. They feel like constructs that the author is using as vehicles to deliver his world building, and if it feels that way then it's not a good story, and obviously I'm in the minority here because most people seem to like this book. Most people do not seem to have a problem with this, and therefore whatever he set out to do Mark Warren's has been successful in them, the eyes and minds of most people who pick up his book, but in my opinion his characters are not characters, and perhaps they become more believably fully fleshed out identifiable characters with personalities in books two and three. I will never find out if that's true because I don't tend to read them because I hated Red Sister, but that was what made it such a struggle. I kept thinking to myself while I was reading it, I was like why can't I get into this? In theory this world was interesting and creative, and the idea of it is something that appeals to me. Why do I hate every single moment of this? And it's because the characters were not characters. None of the scenes were developing them as people, none of their choices were developing them as humans. None of the dialogue was fleshing out their personalities. It was all just constructed to create an opportunity to deliver a philosophy, to deliver some real building, to deliver some magic building, and that I can't invest myself in that. I don't care about anything that's going on if I don't care about the characters, and I don't care about the characters because you've spent all your time using the characters to build your world instead of building a world for these characters to be in and I don't, I don't know why. I honestly don't know if it's because author doesn't know how to write women and that's why this happened, but it was it was so bizarre honestly because I just couldn't get a read on anybody and there's a lot of characters with a lot of weird names and they, I didn't feel like I knew any of them, not even knowing on whose head I was in the entire time. She was just a vehicle to deliver the story. She wasn't a character anyway. Um, that I think is all I have to say about Red Sister, other than glad it's over. Let me know in the comments down below if you are one of the everybody who read Red Sister and loved it. I was bored out of my mind and again the only thing that I can identify is the reason why that would be in a book that's about assassin nuns is that I didn't care about any of the characters so why would I care if any of them is dying or betraying the other or whatever? I did not care and I do not care and I will not read the second or third books. I don't care. So yeah, let me know in the comments down below why I'm wrong, why it's the best series ever, why I totally missed it, or if you like me read it and were baffled and disappointed and don't get why everyone loves it. Do let me know that as well. I post bookish videos on Saturdays and vlogs whenever I feel like. So like and subscribe and I'll see you when I see you. Bye.