Levi is not very convincing as a seventeen year old street lord and con man. When I read Six of Crows, I kinda forgot that the characters were supposed to be teenagers - I was able to suspend disbelief enough to shrug that detail off - but here it is much more glaring.

Armed only with a letter in which her mother instructs her to find Levi Glaisyer, Enne must navigate this place of greed and gluttony, casinos and drugs, and uncover the truth about her mother's disappearance as well as her own past. In this world, Enne Salta arrives in the City of Sin (alt-Vegas, basically) in search of her missing mother. It all seemed like a mishmash of boring politics borrowed from other fantasy novels and renamed here. A lot of information but, unfortunately, not a lot of depth. There's a lot of world-building infodumps about Mizers and monarchists, Talents of Aptitude, Talents of Mysteries, and the miscegenation laws that used to exist between those of different talents.

We are presented with a weird and confusing world. The bigger problem is that Ace of Shades is Six of Crows's shallower, less interesting sibling.

You know what else is mucking annoying? Made up curse words like mucking! Fictional profanity almost always has me laughing (and not in a good way) but it was especially bad here because “mucking” is almost “fucking” but also hilariously… not.īut let's not get hung up on language. Despite Enne’s flaws - namely that she was mucking annoying - she knew how to weasel in and out of a conversation.

Ace of shades enne