This review was originally written and posted in September 2013.

After a year of slavery in the Salt Mines of Endovier, Celaena Sardothien was accustomed to being escorted everywhere in shackles and at sword-point. Most of the thousands of slaves in Endovier received similar treatment—though an extra half-dozen guards always walked Celaena to and from the mines.

Well, clearly these people are doing it right, then.  If she actually needs six guards to escort her places, then she is not nearly beat down enough.

Someone who takes this much time and manpower to keep under control is not a good slave, because you have to put more effort into containing them than you get out of working them.  Just toss her in a cell and conserve your guards. 

So this is our introduction to Celaena, the most notorious assassin in Mary Sue Land.  She’s being taken by all these guards and a hooded man to the main administrative building for whatever some reason.  Apparently they take her on a circuitous route through the building so she can’t find her way around it again.

Yet she’s not blindfolded.

I get them not wanting the assassin to know where the head honcho sleeps, but that’s why you knock her silly and put a sack over her head and then take her to a parlor, not into the bowels of the building.

At least, that was her escort’s intention, because she hadn’t failed to notice when they went up and down the same staircase within a matter of minutes. Nor had she missed when they zigzagged between levels, even though the building was a standard grid of hallways and stairwells. As if she’d lose her bearings that easily. She might have been insulted if he wasn’t trying so hard.

We will quickly find out that this is a common feature in this novel.  The third-person narration will practically gloat over how awesome Celaena is, how her superior super-ness supersedes everyone around her.

The black clothes were probably a part of it, too. His head shifted in her direction, and Celaena flashed him a grin.

God, the telling in this book!  Every single act is explained to us, as if we couldn’t figure it out.  Look, either we can figure out he’s supposed to be intimidating, or you’re not presenting it well enough.  Full stop.

Also, yeah, she’s so been subjected to brutal slave labor for a year.  Can’t you tell?

The guy in black is Chaol Westfall, Captain of the Royal Guard.

suddenly, the sky loomed, the mountains pushed from behind, and even the earth swelled toward her knees.

…um, okay.  If you say so.

When she awoke every morning, she repeated the same words: I will not be afraid. For a year, those words had meant the difference between breaking and bending; they had kept her from shattering in the darkness of the mines.

[…]

She adjusted her torn and filthy tunic with her free hand and held in her sigh.

Um, yeah, that’s some real beat-down-ness there…

They turned down another hallway, and she studied the stranger’s finely crafted sword. Its shimmering pommel was shaped like an eagle midflight.

Anyone who fights with that is just begging to have their hand and arm scratched up.  What a terrible design for a practical sword.

She chats with Chaol, trying to figure out what he’s doing there, but he doesn’t take the bait.  Still waiting for any indication from Celaena that she’s actually been doing slave labor for a year.  She’s practically upbeat as she grins and flirts.

She could disarm two of these guards in a heartbeat. Would the captain fare better than her late overseer? Contemplating the potential outcomes, she grinned at him again.

Yeah, no.  Just…no.  This is way too blithe and casual.  It is not the way someone should be thinking after a year of slave labor.  You can have all the skill in the world, but if you’re starved, injured, sick, and weak, then your skill counts for shit.  There’s a point at which you literally, physically can’t perform certain actions, and that point comes well before a year of slave labor in a mine.

This book takes none of that into account, and as a result, she feels about as far removed from an actual slave as the author herself.

So after several pages of demonstrating how Celaena is not suffering from her year of comfort and pampering, we finally get some world-building about the mine.  They’re in a country called Adarlan, and the other slaves there were either captured through conquest of other countries, or arrested for trying to do magic.  Also, apparently even though magic was an open fact, at some point in the near past it disappeared, so no one can do magic anymore.

I’m now taking bets on how long it’ll be before Celaena proves to be the exception to that last statement.

I think I’ve figured out why they didn’t just have her conduct this business in a ground-floor parlor.  The book wanted some simple, low-key action to disguise her info-dumping and give a chance to show off Calaena’s perfectitude.

Was she finally to be hanged? Sickness coiled in her stomach. She was important enough to warrant an execution from the Captain of the Royal Guard himself.

If she’s that important, why is she even in the slave mines to begin with?  Why not just go ahead and execute her.

They finally arrive at the final destination and it turns out to be some big fancy office thingy, and the crown prince is in there waiting for her.  Dun dun dun!

So that’s the opening chapter to this book.  This was posted on FictionPress before it was traditionally published, and good lord does it show.  You know those fanfictions, where the author will put in a self-insert OC, and she’ll kind of prance through all the ‘hard’ parts of the canon?  “Oh, you struggled for years against the Death Eaters?  I killed a dozen of them in one go!”  “Oh, you’re fighting against being possessed by Satan?  He came after me first and I got rid of him like it was nothing!”  They cut through all the things that made the drama in the canon actually dramatic and they do it while not breaking a sweat and then they giggle after?

Celaena is like those OCs, but without an original canon to draw from.