A review by sergek94
The Bitter Twins by Jen Williams

adventurous emotional funny medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

 

  This was The Fantasy Guild Book Club monthly pick for May 2022!

 “Dark things are happening here, don't be getting me wrong. Young people lost, their poor families going out of their minds, and that evil thing lurking... It should have been dealt with a long time ago, but how could we have known?”

It's been quite a while since I've read the first book of this fantasy trilogy, and I enjoyed it so much because of the very exciting plot and the fascinating world building and the likeable characters. It's safe to say that I had high expectations jumping into the sequel, and fortunately enough, my expectations have been met. In this installment, the beautifully diverse world Jen Williams built kept expanding, and the wish I had after having finished the first book, which was to explore the world in more depth, has been fulfilled in this one. Since this is the middle book of a trilogy, it has to play a delicate balance of moving the plot forward but leaving a great chunk of it unresolved in order to create a suspenseful conclusion in the third book, and one of the ways Jen Williams did this was to incorporate a very interesting side-quest a group of our characters end up embarking on, which serves to expand on the world-building and explore the origins of this vivid fantastical space our characters live in.Meanwhile, we also tackle with the aftermath of the bloody conclusion the first book had, and explore the villains of our story in much more detail, which sheds more light on their origins and their motivations, and the villains in this book are interesting indeed.

Our heroes are fighting an ancient insect civilization led by a menacing queen who will stop at nothing to achieve the ultimate end goal of consuming all life in the world and using that life as a breeding ground for her people to reproduce.As I mentioned in the first review, the villains here are very disgusting to read about, since they're quite literally giant and intelligent insects that unleash their monstrosities on human villages, having hundreds of tiny bugs called burrowers get inside humans and consume them from within, leading to an agonizingly painful death and eventually turning them into mindless zombies that follow the queen's commands.We dig a layer deeper in this book and discover how this insect civilization follows the model of the hive mind, a system our real-life creepy crawlies follow as well. Seeing this mode of functioning on a larger and more intelligent scale was very interesting to read about, and very unnerving. The notion of individuality that is heralded by human societies doesn't exist in their civilization, since everyone is just part of a complex system and the role of the individual is nothing more than to serve the collective.This is why this enemy civilization, the Jure'lia, is a severe threat to everyone, because of their unyielding unity.

As I mentioned earlier, since this is the middle book of the series, there was a limit as to how much the plot could progress, and the major plot progression we saw was with the secondary quest some of our characters embarked on. This might be frustrating to some readers, which is why it's important for the reader to actually like the characters in this series, because this book represents a space where we can hang-out with the characters and go through some tribulations with them, without necessarily resolving the major plot in any significant way.This was an excellent opportunity for lovely relationships to flourish between some characters, and some previously cherished relationships to fall apart among others. Despite not much movement to the central plot, there was significant movement characterization wise which allows the reader to form solid emotional bonds with them. Some characters I liked in the first installment such as Hestillion gradually moved themselves into the list of characters I dislike. Despite being intrigued by Hest in the first book, her actions stopped making sense to me in this one. Other characters, like Aldasair and Bern, became all time favourites. A new character called Eri was also introduced in this book and he put me through an emotional roller-coaster, which attests to Jen Williams's talent for getting the reader attached quite quickly to characters.

I'm glad there's still one book left to read that will let me rejoin these characters and this world, but I'm also sad at the same time since that means it's almost over. I'll be looking forward to reading the third installment, and I definitely still recommend this series to anyone who likes nice adventure fantasy with a small hint of Sci-fi here and there.


 “To be suddenly alone when all you have ever known is connection. To be alone in the dark while you felt the distant pieces of yourself decay.