Tower of Dawn Review - Becca In A Book

Summary

Chaol Westfall and Nesryn Faliq are traveling to the southern continent to visit the empire in Antica where the famous healers of the Torre Cesme live. They have two missions, they must ask this strong and legendary empire to aid in the upcoming threat and ask for their healers to aid Chaol after the conflict with the late King of Adarlan. Will they be able to achieve their goals or will they be denied and left empty handed?

My Thoughts

Okay, so if you didn’t know by now, I am not the biggest Chaol fan so this installment was definitely a difficult feat for me to finish. However, this book is extremely important to the plot of the series so I had to force myself to read it.

I actually ended up really enjoying this installment because a lot of the characters were extremely interesting and it introduced a new empire and a league of healers. First of all, just Yrene was such a great character. I loved her in Assassin’s Blade and the fact that she ended up in this group of healers and pursuing her dream was just so awesome. I loved that she used the knowledge that she learned from Cealeana and taught it to all the women in the tower. Yrene is an amazing human and Chaol does NOT deserve her.

I also really enjoyed getting to see the seaside city of Antica. I thought the semantics of the Khagan and his six children was really interesting and it truly kept me reading so I could learn more. The khagan was an interesting power figure that reminded me of the assassin in the Red Desert from Assassin’s Blade because he didn’t have a lot of dialogue, but when he did, you paid attention. All of his children were interesting, but my favorite had to be Hasar. She was a little scary, but you could see her love and compassion when she spoke about Yrene.

Nesryn also really came into her own in this installment and I truly enjoyed how much she surprised me. We got to learn much more about her background and I loved how she came into her own through experiencing where she really belonged in the world. When she travels with Sartaq to the rukhin clans, she comes into her own and becomes not just a badass warrior, but humbles in my eyes and has such amazing character development. I loved Sartaq and Nesryn together because he appreciates her and she sees him as more than an heir to the khagan.

Chaol was such a struggle for me. In the book, he does become redeemed and becomes much more tolerable, but I’m still holding a grudge. He just goes back and forth for me and I am constantly getting whiplash from him and his inner dialogue. I just can’t take his constant self-pity or self-hatred because he somehow has a habit of using that as an excuse for his terrible behavior. Yes, I know Aelin does this all the time, but for some reason when he does it, it makes me want to scream in anger. The way he treated Nesryn and Yrene sometimes in the book made me want to go to Antica and slap the crap out of him. However, he finally gets his head out of his butt and treats Yrene like gold so I guess he’s not a jerk anymore.

Overall, this sixth installment was a great addition to the overall plot and added some amazing characters to the story.