Blood and Ash Series: Book #3 The Crown of Gilded Bones
*SPOILERS*
The Crown of Gilded Bones is the third installment in Jennifer Armentrout’s Blood and Ash series. This book picks up immediately where the second book ends and follows Penellaphe as she heads to Atlantia. She is freshly married to Casteel and must come to grips with her new reality. No longer is she the Maiden of Solis, but now the descendent of a god.
The relationship between Casteel and Poppy is a beautiful depiction of loyalty and unconditional love. There is no drama between the two that could ever impact their connection. I appreciated how their relationship was not used to create intense conflict. As a team they take on the chaos around them, cementing their bond further. Too often a couple unites in literature merely to separate shortly after due to a convoluted miscommunication that arises to create tension between the two.
However, there is a large amount of sexual tension and innuedos involving Casteel’s best friend Kieran. It’s heavily implied that there will be some type of threesome or bonding between the three of them at some point. That could perhaps lead to future conflict...and I don’t know how to feel about that.
A personal current conflict I have is with Poppy’s continued identity as the-girl-who-asks-too-many-questions. It’s repetitive, boring, and lazy. There. I said it! If you didn’t catch my review for Book #2; a quick recap: “this is just a way to feed the reader information without having us/Poppy earn it. If she’s confused about something then she just asks someone and if they don’t know then she asks someone else. Essentially, everyone is like a walking Google search.” I stand by my previous statement. It’s too easy and because of that I got bored. I wanted to see her work for information rather than having it tossed into her lap. For instance, Poppy is betrayed by a close companion in the beginning of The Crown of Gilded Bones and he essentially unloads chapters worth of information on her. Then once she’s freed from his hold she simply continues asking questions to clarify his statements. Her role feels passive, I suppose, in this way.
Subsequently, the betrayal feels like a last minute addition to the story. It doesn’t really make sense given the context of who the character was previously and his motives are bewildering. It honestly feels like Armentrout is reaching. That betrayal, though, serves as an introduction to yet another group of people called the Unseen who are basically zombies--unlike the Descenters, a similar group.
Rapidly it feels like too much is happening, but nothing is actually being accomplished. Poppy is betrayed, abducted, freed, having lots of sex, asking too many questions, and having spontaneous fight scenes, and then arguing with Casteel’s parents. This is within the first 200 pages. THIS BOOK IS 645 PAGES.
I’m just gonna say it…I think Armentrout was discovering the plot while writing The Crown of Gilded Bone and not in a good way.
Final Thoughts:
I’m disappointed that this series didn’t hit the mark for me. I had such high expectations going into it. TikTok and BookTube are overflowing with raving reviews and I was hoping to be among them.
I did enjoy a huge portion of this series so far. I intensely appreciate the love that Poppy and Casteel have for each other and the entertaining sarcasm that Kieran is always dispensing. I think the world is so darn interesting, that’s why it’s frustrating to me that we only really start to discover Atlantia, the actual people and cities, about 300 pages into the third book. (Spessa’s End in the second book doesn’t count. That’s still in Solis and technically not even a city, it’s ruins when Poppy sees it.)
Geez, this series has everything I should love. Medieval cities and swordfights, vampires and werewolves, and even intense romance, BUT it also has things like too much exposition and severely modern dialogue that personally took me out of the story. Then there’s the distinct feeling that some of the plot was created as the books were being written (ie. twists, betrayals, dialogue…). Unfortunately, there were too many cons for me to truly enjoy reading The Crown of Gilded Bone.
My Review 2.5/5