Review: Dance of Thieves, by Mary E. Pearson

Hi!
Wow, I've been gone for a while, but I promise I've been reading (9 books since my last post), and latest was Dance of Thieves!

Pros:

🗡 Okay, first of all the cover is gorgeous. (It has thannis vines and the Ballenger crest and a dagger. That's epic.)

🗡 The world was epic. (Epic is my new favorite word, apparently. Or maybe "epic" is just the accepted way to describe this book?) We only had one forest, and it was more like a thicket and they only spent a couple days there! We had brezalots and Candok bears and racaa. We had thannis and tembris and birchwings.

🗡 Political intrigue, oooh.

🗡 Names like Hell's Mouth, Tor's Watch, and Kazimyrah.

🗡 Daggers and thieves!! (I have a "thing" for pickpockets, which is kind of disturbing. I blame Casablanca and the "funny little fellow." Has anybody else watched Casablanca? If you have, hopefully you'll know what I'm talking about . . . honestly, the pickpocket is the part I remember best.)

🗡 Synové and Wren.

🗡 The Ballengers. I loved their history and their fierce family pride and their protection of one another.

Cons:

🗡 The names didn't hang together, which really bothered me. You had "Mason" and "Gunner" and "Jase" and then you had "Priya" and "Aram" and "Zane". The Vendans' names hung together somewhat better, but still . . . "Kazimyrah" and "Wren." I'm writhing. (Internally. I'm writhing internally.)

🗡 There was a lot of telling, like Kazi would be remembering something from her past, and then she'd have a conversation with one of the other characters where she'd tell him/her everything she just thought. So basically you had lots of info dumps . . . but then the info dumps were scattered throughout the story and I was really confused at first.

🗡 It was 505 pages!! You can condense!! I just read Writing Irresistable Kidlit, by Mary Kole, and I agree with Ms. Kole that if your book is that long, your idea was probably too big. 

🗡 Confusing. A bunch of the time the story felt disjointed. I wished we could have had Kazi's flashbacks told as flashbacks so there could've been more showing.

And those are my thoughts!

Although as soon as I publish this, I'm sure I'll think of something else. 

Hmm . . . 🤔

Nope, I think I'm done.

Have you read Dance of Thieves? What did you think?