 Alright, so I have finally finished reading A Sky Beyond the Storm, which actually came out almost two months ago now, but like I just... I added the stuff in the way so I didn't get to... get to it, and I can confidently say that it is a solid ending to a solid series. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. So I have talked a little bit about an Ember in the Ashes on this channel before, not all that much, but it is a good series. You know, I've mentioned that every time I bring it up. It is young adult fantasy, and I'm normally not a fan of young adult fantasy, but this series is still pretty good. And the way that that works is that it doesn't really do anything new. Let's be clear on that. It follows pretty much all the same tropes and cliches and everything you've seen before. And some of those, it does play around with a little bit. There are a few plot twists sprinkled throughout the series that I didn't see coming, and some themes did come up that I wasn't expecting at the beginning. It is definitely a little more complex than a lot of its genre contemporaries. But, you know, you've seen most of this before, and it works because all of the characters... Well, all the characters work. You know, they all have at least a little bit of personality and a little bit of depth to them. Only, like, the major characters are done super well, but even the side characters, they're all... Well, they're real people. Or at least they feel like real people, feel like facsimiles are real people, you know? None of them feel like total cardboard cutouts. None of them feel like total cliches. And so because of that, you grow attached to them, and then when bad things happen to them, or even when good things happen to them, it makes sense and you feel for them. For example, when the two main leads, Lya and Elias, start to fall in love in the latter part of the first book, and especially in the second book, it makes sense that they would feel that way. You know, it doesn't just come out of nowhere, and it doesn't feel like, okay, the plot demands that this happens, so now it's happening. In fact, you could actually remove their romance from the story as a whole, and it would still work out pretty well. You know, you could just have them be friends or something, and it would still work. You'd lose some of the heart of the series, because their romance is genuinely pretty good, and in fact, they are part of a love triangle, which is not terribly done, and I liked that as well. But just having them have an actual connection rather than insta-love, and they suddenly die for each other, that adds so much more to the series, and makes it feel so much more real as opposed to checking off a list of boxes. But enough about the series as a whole. A sky beyond the storm itself, this one picks up not long after the last book ended, like, you know, the Nightbringer, the King of the Jinn finally managed to free the rest of his people, and from their imprisonment they've gone insane, so now they're just gonna go kill all of humanity, and also the Martial Empire has been split in half, and the Old Emperor is dead, and Charis Vitturia, or actually it might be Vitturia, because like in Latin V's make more of a U sound, but I don't know. Not important, I don't think the author intended it that way, but Charis Vitturia declared herself Empress, and she's going around trying to kill everyone who doubts that she's Empress. So the heroes are in a bit of a bind, and also Elias has fully become the Soulcatcher, like his memories and his emotions and everything are pretty much gone, and so it's, in a lot of ways, it's pretty much what you would expect from the last entry in a series, like, oh shit, the bad guys are about to win, how are we gonna get out of this? And as I said earlier, it sticks the landing. You know, like I said, doesn't really do anything too unexpected, but it does everything well. Like, when there's battles and when they're trying to unite all the good guys to fight the bad guy, it's done pretty well. When there are action scenes, they're done pretty well. When there are character beats and people reaching the end of their arcs, it's done pretty well. And I wish I could go into a whole lot more specifics there, but I mean, that would involve basically going line by line through all four of the books, and that's not really what a review is, that's more of a super in-depth video essay analysis type thing. And so basically, it's kind of hard to explain, but like, yeah, it does a lot of the same things we've seen before, but it does them pretty well. I do have a couple of issues though, and I want to stress that they're all minor, but they really are what makes this last entry and really the series as a whole. It makes it good, in fact really good. I think the first two books are genuinely fantastic, but the series as a whole and this last one I think are just good rather than the great that they could have been. For starters, the POV problem. Now, first book just has Elias and Lya, and it switches back and forth between their first person POVs, and it's neither their narrations stand out from one another, but it's not a big problem because there's only two people and because they're both off doing such different things that you can read a little bit and already be pretty sure which one you're reading. Then the next book adds a third person, Helene, and that's when it started to get a little confusing. The third book added a fourth person, and then this last one adds a fifth. Now, the vast majority of them are still Lya, Elias, and Helene, but the Nightbringer does get a fair number of chapters to himself, and we actually get one from Charis Faturia, and man, I like the prose in this, I like the way it's super poetic and lilting, and I like that, but all the characters just sound the same, and they're all doing similar things, like preparing for battle and such, and so they don't really stand out from one another all that much, and occasionally I did get confused about who I was reading. And I'm just gonna keep saying this till I'm blue in the face. If you are going to write a book or series or whatever from multiple characters' perspectives, you either have to go really hard in making them sound completely different from one another in their narration style, like the young world is really the only example I can think of of that, or you can do it where every book in the series is told from a different character, so even if they're not that different, it's not that hard to remember who you're reading, like the Animorphs did this, for example, or just write it all in third person. Like I really find myself wishing that this whole series had been written in third person because, well, the prose I think is pretty good, like I said, it's poetic and everything, but it feels weird for characters to be thinking along those lines, especially when it's all the exact same way, so yeah, that's not a huge problem, but it did bother me. Another thing is that, okay, so the gin are hurt by salt, like, you know, that makes sense, mystical creature hurt by some mundane thing, like silver or sunlight or something like that, okay, that's fine, but in this it makes a bunch of references to people coating their weapons in salt and using them to fight the gin, which doesn't make sense because salt is a powder, like if you sprinkled it on a sword or something and then you tried swinging it, it would immediately all fall off. That's weird to me. Like maybe you could put something in the salt to make it stick or maybe you could just dip your sword in salt water and then dry it out in the sun real quick and there'd still be little granules stuck on the blade, maybe, but none of them ever mention anything like that, and well, it's such a weird thing. Every time it came up it took me out of it and it would have been so easy to just fix that somehow, but it never was fixed, and on that matter, I think Helene. So, okay, you know what? This book is a little over 500 pages long. It didn't need to be that long, and the biggest culprit in that is that around a quarter of Helene's chapters don't really add anything and they could have either taken some of the information and folded them into other chapters or just cut them out entirely, we wouldn't have missed that much, and we probably would have had a book that was 30 pages shorter overall, which, yeah, that would have been better. And, well, my only real complaint about this book, and even though it's not the biggest one ever, it's just that it lost its dark edge. Like with this one the series is no longer as dark as it used to be and that was one of the things that helped it stand out from other young adult fantasy stuff, which, as I mentioned, I'm just not that big a fan of. Like I said, going into this, no one who's reading this far is really questioning whether, oh, will they save the world or not because, like, you know they'll save the world. They might lose some stuff along the way, but they'll do it. Whereas the first three books, even if you weren't thinking the world was going to get destroyed, there was some super dark messed up stuff in there, and I'm not just talking about the violence and the rape and such because, you know, that's obviously there. But in the first book, you really got a feeling for what it was like for Laya because she was an oppressed minority living in a police state, you know? The government and private citizens can do whatever the hell they want to her and people like her, and she has no defense and basically no recourse against them. And that's some heavy shit to deal with. And then the second and third books, we see a genocide take place and it's mostly through the eyes of someone who has some power and she wants to help but she just cannot do it. She's still powerless to stop it. And we also see it through the eyes of people who are just caught up in the middle of it and they can't even protect themselves. All they can do is run and the whole, all the while they're watching other people like them be killed. And so it's super dark and then this book doesn't really have anything to replace those. So it's just a pretty standard, hey, bad guy's trying to destroy the world with a big magical thingy-ma-jig. Let's stop the bad guy from destroying the world with his big magical thingy-ma-jig. And I'm going to have to do a brief spoiler section after this because there is one plot point at the end that I thought, or plot twist at the end that I thought was really, really stupid. And, well, basically I just feel that they didn't have to sacrifice nearly enough to earn their happy ending. Like, I'm okay with this series having a happy ending because they clearly had to suffer and crawl and scrape to get there. But they didn't have to suffer quite, they didn't suffer quite enough, I don't feel. And so the ending didn't have quite the same bite and impact as maybe it could have had. But all that said, that's it for the non-spoiler section. I think An Ember in the Ashes is a very solid series. I think that even though it doesn't really do anything new, it does it all very well. There are still a few things in there that surprised me. And I think if you're someone who is into young and old fantasy, you'll probably really like this. If you're not, then you might still enjoy it. Like, because it is darker, but it's also not quite as dark as a lot of regular epic fantasy. And, well, it's just a little comfier, I think. Yeah, that might sound weird considering some of the subject matter, but it's just a bit comfier. You don't have to think too hard while reading it, it's mostly pretty surface level. And I don't know, I enjoyed it. So if you're looking for something like that, I think you'll enjoy this series. And A Sky Beyond the Storm, it sticks the landing. So if you read the first three books and you're still excited for this one, you'll definitely enjoy this one. The heartless obey me now, Sora. Now I have nothing to fear. You're stupid! Okay, real quick. The only thing about this book that really bothered me was a twist that came right at the end. So at the end of the third book, we found out the identity of Cook and we realized, oh, that's actually Laya's mother. And that's how she was able to be such a crazy badass. And I liked that. It was pretty good. It was a huge moment for Laya as a character and for Cook as a character. And then immediately afterwards, Cook had to sacrifice herself to let Laya escape and to help her live. And it was actually genuinely pretty heartbreaking because she thought her mom was dead, then she finds out she's alive, and then she loses her again right away. That's really sad. But then near the end of this book, her mom just comes back. Yeah, there is an explanation given. It's just, oh, well they didn't check my body during the battle, so I managed to get away. Yeah, it was... it's not a very good explanation. And then she also decides that she wants to take the mantle of Soulcatcher from Elias, so he's not trapped doing that. And then he can be a human again, and him and Laya can get married and live happily ever after. And... well... that felt pretty bullshitty. That felt very bullshitty, in fact. Because like I said, I'm fine with them having a happy ending if they have to suffer for it, but they didn't really have to suffer for that. And while I definitely prefer in this sort of series, I prefer having a happy ending over having a tragic ending, I would rather have had a tragic ending of Elias and Laya love each other, but he's stuck being his ghost shepherd for all eternity. I think that would have been a lot better than this because this just kind of comes out of nowhere and is very unsatisfying. Other than that, I like the ending, though. I would not be able to do stuff like this. And if you want to get your name up here, or if you want to get access to other stuff like seeing my videos early or voting on polls to determine what I'll cover next, then consider becoming one of my patrons. A dollar a month, that's all it takes. And if you don't feel like doing that, or if you can't, then just rating this video, commenting on it, and subscribing to my channel. Those all really help me. And I will see you guys later. Bye.