Thank you to Netgalley for providing an eARC of this novel in 2020 in exchange for an honest review. My deepest apologies for my review being so egregiously late.

Writing reviews for anything after the first book in a series is always challenging for me. I’m not sure how much I should say or keep hidden. The announcement of new characters can be as much of a spoiler as the silence of an old character. I teeter on the edge with these reviews and hope that I can still do the book, and future readers, justice.

The first book ended in heartbreak, and I was so hoping the second would set its sights on mending it. While that may have happened through the course of the novel, the first quarter was even more devastating than I could have imagined or planned for.

A major difference in book two is that we now have multiple points of view as the story progresses. I loved this choice because our main characters are varied and no longer within a day’s ride of one another. In book one it was easy to follow Languoreth and those who orbited her, making multiple points of view unnecessary.

Another major difference was the duration of time for book two. Instead of following a character from childhood to her early thirties, we followed the span of about seven years. While a lot can happen in that time period, I did feel slightly less emotionally connected to some of our new points of view. Languoreth’s story in book one intertwined within my own soul as I was reading. I watched her grow and learn and overcome. Though I enjoyed the multiple POV’s, and it was necessary to help the story to progress, it did mean that my connection with the characters was split. Instead of one character having my full attention we jumped not only from person to person, but also location and place in time.

This story is masterfully written. Switching forward and backward years or months from character to character cannot be easy as an author, and yet the story flowed effortlessly from page to page. I never felt out of place or confused as the reader, and often found myself mentally calculating if this character is here on this date what were the other’s doing at the same time? This is definitely not a light novel that can be read with little brain power on the reader’s part. This novel requires time and attention to detail, and empathy to love, loss, madness, and war.

I felt like I was on the edge of my seat for the entire novel. I had so many questions about the character’s mindsets, locations, well being, and outcomes. Where book one ended in heartache, book two ended in hope for the future. I’m so looking forward to seeing what will befall our main characters next time, and selfishly hope that for some they might find a happy ending even if their people might never find peace.