Reviews for Arrow's Fall (Heralds of Valdemar Series #3)

The average rating for Arrow's Fall (Heralds of Valdemar Series #3) based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-10-22 00:00:00 James Webb Talia is back from her one and a half years of internship. She now can start on her duty as the Queen's adviser (actually, her title in the book is different, but the job description is exactly the same). It turns out the court's intrigues are way more deadly than the patrolling of borderlands. Her love live is also kind of bad, and there is also a matter of extremely grim prophesy about her future. For better or worse, this trilogy in general and this book in particular are built around the character of Talia. This means that the novel is really good when Talia is at her best and it is extremely frustrating read when she is at her worst. Her personal problems come from the inability of three people (Talia included) to communicate between each other. This plot-line practically killed the entire book. Up until the very end I was sure I would give this novel 3 stars. I changed my mind only I finished reading and had time to think about what I read - the whole trilogy that is. I will have to repeat myself, but the character of Talia is brilliant. She is what a strong woman in fantasy should be (hint: strong in this case does not equal physical strength which can be achieved by anybody with lots of steroids and heavy-lifting). This is about the ability to overcome all the obstacles and care about the welfare of other human beings no matter how miserable you are at the moment - there was a scene in this novel which shows this clearly. My special thanks go to Armina for helping me with my read. This review is a copy/paste of my Leafmarks one:

Review # 2 was written on 2014-04-16 00:00:00 Kathy Milonas [Kris' death. That hit as hard as it should have, but I was okay with it, I was. Sometimes, the good people have to die and I think it's important to show that. But then, literally a page or two later, Talia gets captured, stripped, raped, beaten, thrown into a cell. She's then tortured by the 'baddies' of the book (who were unfortunately very one-dimensional so far), who of course are sexual sadists who get off on torturing her, which feels to her (in her own words) like being raped all over again. And it never gets better, it really is all downhill from there. As I was reading it, I thought, the only way this could be salvaged is if it was at least used. If Talia used it to harden, to become stronger, maybe to try and get her revenge and go to the brink of going overboard, like they'd hinted she had been in the past, only to stop herself and be the better person, etc etc. But none of that happened. In fact, Talia is bafflingly barely present in the second half of the book. She's rescued by Dirk, who "fetches" her using his magic. After that, literally all she does is tell people what happened and get healed. This massive battle passes with her only influence being helping link some people together so they can kill a mage. I mean sure, she's there, but she's not there in the way she should be. These are Talia's books! It should be about her coming full circle and becoming the person she was Chosen to be! In the end, the "drama" over the enemy isn't even wrapped up. I assume that's to carry over into the next trio of books but frankly, it seemed kind of half-assed, like she just cut them off so she could end with the wedding. Even worse, the rape and it's effects on her are literally never handled. She off-handledly mentions to Skif once that being touched by men affects her, and then literally two pages later it's a week or so later and poof, she's magically mind-healed and fine with getting married and having sex with her husband, tra la la. Compared to how the author at least tactfully handled Talia's issues with abusive men in the first book, I was SO disappointed by how it was handled in this one. It was so pointless, so why did she even need to get raped to begin with? It didn't affect anything, it didn't do anything, it was another case of someone pointlessly using rape as some way of getting across how "horrifyingly evil" the villain is, and then just sweeping it under the rug! (hide spoiler)]