Benghis Kahn's Reviews > The Veiled Throne

Another very solid Dandelion Dynasty chunker that's sitting where Wall of Storms was around 4.5 stars for me. I still have yet to fully and deeply connect to the story or maybe the storytelling style, though I was engaged the whole way through and never felt like it was a slog or just a set-up book for the finale.

As with the last book, we get some new youthful POV characters here who just jumped off the page for me and were so endearing and joyful to spend time with in Dandelion and Kinri. Kinri's journey and then intersecting plot with Dandelion was a series highlight so far, and the hundreds of pages we spend at the restaurant and in the restaurant contest were just so heartfelt and such a nice change of pace. There were some great passages of elegant writing full of wisdom in this section that elevated the read along with relatable and poignant inner character conflicts.

I also want to shout out the first part of the book with new POV Goztan, which was just such an incredible flashback to establish that character and another angle of the political and cultural conflicts going on.

I was less a fan of the time spent in other locations, where things either felt predictable (specifically the major setback for one of the groups) or less interesting with characters I didn't find as compelling. Liu goes into full caricature mode for certain antagonists in this series, and that's just something that never really works for me. Also there are A LOT of side characters, and about half of them feel 3-D and distinctive, while the other half never really feel like much of anything to me besides a name, and that is definitely hurting my overall investment in a lot of these sequences.

Overall though this massive tome was a worthwhile read, and I'm eager to see how everything plays out!