What is the essence of Glass Sword? Mere is a hypocritical ninny, who is so self absorbed she learns NOTHING from her mistakes or the choices made around her and God forbid if she doesn't have an internal monologue whiny rant about her specialness or how like everyone else she is (yeah it gave me whiplash too), her torn heart, or her neglect of those she loves every few paragraphs. The neglect of everyone she loves is a repeating theme through the book and you guessed it, she never changes, just whines about it, over and over. Yep, that about sums it up. I hated the heroin and actually wanted her to die so Cal or maybe Shade could take over in her stead. Yep, I wanted the main character to die because I disliked everything about her that much. 
 To make matters even worse, there was no actual story in the entire book. it was like there was 100 pages of potential story and to make it last Aveyard regurgitated the same story over and over and over to make it go longer. On top of having exactly no real story, all the characters were pretty much as forgettable as fog and the only semi interesting fellow ends up vanishing and then reappears at the very end at the side of the evil king. 
 It was a painful read and my brain honestly hurts as I struggle to understand how in the world this series got published in the first place and after that how it has any kind of fan base at all. I do understand that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" but this book is like looking at a hand print in the middle of a blank canvas and having crowds of people swarming ooing and ahing over it, calling it the masterpiece of the century. Yes, it was THAT bad.