I’ve been stalling on posting this review. I read this before it came out back in October, but I just had to force myself to finish it. I wanted to love this. I love the Princess Bride. Like, wore the VHS tape out loved it. I was so excited for this book!
And…it’s nothing like the Princess Bride. Where did that description even come from?
There’s a lot to be said about how this book starts. It’s a fantastic idea, and seriously it’s a great point. What does happen after “The End,” so to speak. This book starts the night before a Big Battle. Think Avengers ending battle, think Troy, think of whatever epic battle you want to. But, what happens to everyone after? And more importantly, what happens to the warriors after a huge battle that’s been won and brings peace to the nations? Seriously, that’s a great idea! The very beginning is right before the Big Battle, and we get tiny snippets of the heroes through the perspective of one man, one major hero. This is not much. It’s tidbits. I think it’s supposed to be unbiased, but it’s just not enough.
But so little information is given out throughout, and it takes forever to get those bits, that it’s hard to get to know who the characters were. That’s important because very few of them are likeable now, ten years later, so a lot seems to be dependent upon who they were. Yet we don’t know. We get very little backstory and it’s not well-done.
So the adventure begins! And the anachronisms that bothered a lot of the reviewers didn’t actually bother me. However there’s very little world building for that sort of thing, it just is there. It exists and we suspend belief. Cool, annoying though. I didn’t even mind the magical horse drawn Uber they can call, totally fine. The magical tapestries that worked like the internet, and had fan message boards for their favorite actors, a little weird, but fine. But again, no worldbuilding. It just…was. Okay. I can work with that, I guess.
But the personalities of the characters just all kind of suck. And with 3 separate authors? It’s obvious. The book feels disjointed at times. I wonder if each author just took a couple and ran with it, rather than all of them working together. And speaking of each couple, this was very Big Misunderstanding of them.
Short version: After the battle that they did win, they were recognized as heroes. But the man from the beginning, the “best of them all,” was killed in the battle. This is part of what broke up their friendships. One of The Four died, one became a hermit, one became a celebrity and reveled in it, and one married into a bad marriage and when she left her husband, that’s where our story starts.
The Four are brought back together when the queen requests them at a ceremony. They go out of obligation, but this is where the “adventure” begins. I found them frustrating. I wanted more. I wanted them to be heroic, I wanted them to less…whiny.
I kept waiting for the fun. I kept waiting for the romance. I kept waiting for the excitement. This was not, in fact, fun.
2 stars
***ARC courtesy of Avon Books
