Mahimata (Asiana, #2)

by Rati Mehrotra

[sa090]

Yeah..... this was not a fun book to read for me, also felt way longer than it needed to be.

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I really really don’t think that this is a bad book, it’s got an interesting mix of sci-fi and fantasy while having assassins as the main characters. Yet, the book is still incredibly boring to read with the amount of things added in, that makes them feel like nonsense to me. I absolutely love journeys in books because of the revealed information through them, but here, we get some information about the Ones (which I correctly guessed the origins of from last time and written in that entry), but it doesn’t go into that depth about their motives or reasons for coming, to name a few. Instead the book focuses more on the characters, which is never a bad thing, IF it was handling their development more than anything else and while this book does start off with that focus, it quickly becomes secondary to other things.

I really wish that those other things were just about the efforts to destroy Kai Tau and the threat to Asiana, but to be very honest, this felt more like a contemporary with a sci-fi and fantasy sprinkles. The romance in this book is such a big focus that I’m taken a back a bit, the first book didn’t have that to the same extent (even when the relationship there was because it’s “YA” and not much else to go on) and you’d think that with the looming threat, it’ll be even smaller here but I guess that’s just my way of thinking. Pages upon pages are wasted on Kyra thinking about Rustan and vice versa, it’s not fun to read and with a base this weak to begin with, it’s just downright boring. Because these instances were added everywhere, Mahimata felt as if it’s got them to get extra padding and make it a thicker book than it needed to be.

I mean, yes, Kyra now has to understand more about her own duties and what not. But then again, the snowflake-y feel to it all just kills it for me. It doesn’t even help when Kyra comes off as incredibly self entitled, who thinks that this new position means you “receive” respect and makes up new rules to be followed because she can. It doesn’t work like that and I wanted to slap her when she was actually surprised that no one respected her whatsoever, you’re a child darling, who in their right mind would when you’ve done nothing to deserve it yet? Rustan on the other hand, may have been the one who got to show me the information I wanted to learn, albeit it not being in that much depth, but overall, all the time devoted to him in this book was pointless. He’s incredibly boring as a character and other than actually moving on, there weren’t any noticeable changes to him.

After all that buildup in the book, you’ll think that the upcoming final confrontation would be so badass and filled with excitement. But to me personally, it was just anticlimactic. Hundreds of pages of build up for a final fight that was more words than nothing else, does a final fight have to be filled with action? If you’re dealing with assassins as your main characters then hell yes it does, talk no jutsu can stick to psychological battles. That’s not the worst part for me though in that fight, no, the more bad part here is the existence of Mental Arts and how the lack of usage of said arts is just for the convenience of the plot. I mean if everyone using them can make me, a civilian, do whatever they want, then why in God’s name did Kai Tau last this long??

He may have been a marksman previously and might’ve been hard to kill in a one to one, but his people surely aren’t the same as evident in some encounters here. It’s not fun whatsoever when a book hypes up something for the entirety of its series, just to have it end like this, it’s not fun. Why sacrifice this for romance? Why have me meet so many characters who won’t end up doing much just for me to forget them when the new batch comes along? Reading this book was a very frustrating experience for me, I hoped for so much more than what I received and I’m honestly so glad that it’s a duology because one more DNF would have probably thrown me into a reading slump.

Final rating: 1.5/5