Please don’t hurt me ?
I absolutely get how some people will love this book. I... did not. Here are my four main reasons:

1. As you may have read from many other reviews, it took ages to get going. Actually, it only started getting interesting around 70% of the way through for me. I honestly forced myself through 300 pages hoping to get that UMPF I was expecting from the writer of my favourite book (Six of Crows). But this made me realise what my main issue was:

2. King of Scars isn’t just another book set in the Grishaverse. It’s the continuation of the Grisha / Shadow and Bone trilogy. We follow the aftermath of that series and what’s going on with those characters today. It felt very info-dumpy and kinda like we should be content with just having the characters from the trilogy interact once more, without any plot actually being developed…
And don't get me wrong, I am interested in Nikolai, but clearly not as much as many others are. I did not succumb to his charm but i was interested in the dark part of his storyline.
Zoya stole the show for me, she was absolutely amazing and definitely the most fleshed out character (probably because we didn't get all the info about her in the other Grishaverse series).
It also felt like Nina was added in so that the people who weren’t as into the Grisha trilogy but loved Six of Crows stayed on board. As much as I enjoyed her part of the story, anyone else could have done it. It is so detached from the rest of the book that it almost deserves its own one (yes, I bet things will come together eventually but I’m judging this one book rn). And she repeats the same thoughts over and over for the first half of the book. It gets annoying.
A fourth character starts getting his own POV around 70% in which once again proves when the actual story starts.

3. And during those last 30% ? Well it turned out to be a veeeeeery similar plot to… Harry Potter. Here’s why (hidden cause may be a little too much info:

Spoiler

it’s basically the story of a horcrux. Nikolai has part of the bad guy inside him (not even on purpose, oh “the horcrux he never meant to create”!) and there were even talks of “neither one can live while the other one survives” like…. SOUNDS FAMILIAR!? + that ending…

)

4. And of course, that ending has got everyone shook (or not so much), which I understand, again, if you loved the original Grisha trilogy… I didn’t. I almost find it cheap…

Final note: Trassel gave me all the feels and he and Hanne deserve at least one of these stars all to themselves.