It is the end of the world, they are fighting a losing battle. Demons have infested their world and they want to ruin all of it. A Queen who can control fire and her friends must fight to save the world they love and to try and make it a better place. Kingdom of Ash is the last book in the Throne of Glass series written by Sarah J. Maas. Fans of the series have been waiting for two years to finally figure out what happened to their favorite characters.
Kingdom of Ash takes place a few months after Empire of Storm. We are reunited with characters from the very beginning of the series and a few from the prequel. Kingdom of Ash answers everyone’s questions and we learn a lot of information. The ending was very nice and it was a happy ending which probably made a lot of people happy that their favorite characters after having to go through so much finally had a happy ending. I was happy that the characters ended up, for the most part, having a happy ending but a part of me also wanted the ending to be a little sadder. It would have made it more realistic, well as realistic as you can get with a fantasy series. It would have been a really interesting turn of events if Aelin did not survive forging the lock. The characters would have had to figure out how to win this war without their Queen and her firepower. Would they have been able to win the war without her?
One of my favorite things in the series that we really see in Kingdom of Ash is Dorian’s character improvements from how he was in the first book to how he is in the last book. He is first introduced as a prince who is not interested in running his country in the future. But as things get darker as the series goes along Dorian experiences some hardships and terrible things that change him completely. His kingdom has been ruined and so had Dorian, he became a stranger to himself and he was lost. In Kingdom of Ash, he is slowly starting to rebuild himself into who he used to be but also a better person. The way Maas wrote his character is really interesting because she could have kept his character the same throughout the series but she wrote him as a person who loses his himself in emotional and mental trauma who has to figure something out if he wants to help his friends save their world. At the end of the book, he wants to rebuild his kingdom to be better and he himself wants to be a better King.
While it was a really good book, something that disappointed me was when Aelin was forging the lock she did not die. Through this entire book and the previous one, a major thing has been if Aelin or Dorian forge the lock they would die. These characters have been agonizing over it and the time has finally come for it to happen. Somehow Aelin survives and the only thing that happened was she lost part of her magic, so she is not as powerful as she used to be. To me, I was a little disappointed because I expected it to be major and that Aelin would die, and I was wondering how they would ever win the war without. Maas took the easy way out, she could have made her book even better but she didn’t. Instead of sacrificing Aelin she sacrificed her book from being heart-wrenchingly sad. I think Maas felt too connected to her characters that she wanted the series to have a happy ending instead of trying to make it even better.
Overall, it was a good book and it was a nice way to end the series. For most of the characters, it was a nice way to end their stories. I would recommend this series to people who like to read fantasy and like to read about magic and new worlds much different from our reality.
by Amber Slaughter
The Claw 