I burned through this audiobook at about the same furious rate as the first one, even though it is several hours longer. It maintained the same energy and excitement of the first book, and ended on even bigger of a cliffhanger. I don't want to say much about the plot because it's better to go in blind. However, I really enjoyed all of the ways in which both this book and the previous one are writing back against Harry Potter and deliberately challenging points from that series. For example, a major complaint of mine about the Harry Potter epilogue is that Hogwarts has not been reformed in any way to make it a better educational institution- the house system has not been abolished, and it's hard to imagine that the quality of the teaching has improved either. I really wanted the main character, El, of this series to fundamentally alter the entire paradigm of the terrible magical boarding school of this series, the Scholomance, so that no future student would have to go through the horrible challenges that she had faced. I can comfortably say say that yes, she did indeed do that!