I found myself growing resentful at the start of each new chapter because of the way my focus was continually redirected. I feel that the back-and-forth structure is actually doing a disservice to Lyons’ own great storytelling. With an incredible talent in describing both scenery and action, Lyons’s writing trusts the reader to keep up, and reminds me of the joy I found in fantasy books as a child, when all plots and tropes were still brand new to me.
The worldbuilding of The Ruin of Kings is an absolute delight, dropping the reader into a fully-fledged world in which every detail of every building, monster, and magical spell seems real enough to reach out and touch. That said, it’s impossible not to be impressed with the ambition of it all, the sheer, effervescent joy Lyons takes in the scope of her project. Parsing the genealogy of immortals quickly grows frustrating and tedious I often felt as if I were reading the middle book of a trilogy without having read the first. The Ruin of Kings muddles stakes and scale, often substituting the latter for the former. The narrative infelicities that don’t stand up to scrutiny.are shored up by the scholar’s presence, and epigraph stating that he’s condensed and edited some things to make it a more enjoyable read for the mysterious royal personage to whom he has delivered it. I’m an absolute sucker for innovative structures, and really appreciated setup-in addition to maintaining that 'but how did they get here' tension, the story-swapping makes for short, snappy chapters that put me in mind of the adage about the best way to eat an elephant.
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