This is the second book in the "Hostage of Empire" series, a vaguely East-Asian inspired fantasy series stock-full of political intrigue, morally grey to extremely dark-grey characters and beautiful prose.

Several things about this book make me rank it lower than I normally would with this: 

First: The author is not East Asian, not even diaspora if my research is correct. Their "representation" on paper is therefore possibly more of an aesthetics thing than anything else - I'm not knowledgeable enough when it comes to matters like this but even I could notice that the names for the respective countries and their people seem to be a bit of a hodgepodge of different Asian cultural naming techniques. There's also a barrage of clichés I do not feel comfortable calling true or false - like the filial but obedient daughter Yara is supposed to be. Personally, I'd be more comfortable knowing the author is drawing on her own culture than simply using this as a backdrop for her book

Second: As much as I love Takshin, I did not enjoy what he did by the end of the book - I'm a fan of messy relationships but this one came a bit out of left field for me, or at least the particular brand of messiness. I'm intrigued to see where it will lead but I wasn't very pleased with it in the book :))

Overall, apart from that, the book is a good second book to the series. Things escalate a lot further than they did in book one and by the end of it all, we're left with a crumbling Empire and a broken shard of family, scattered between life and death, fidelity and their own gain. It's certainly a dark note to be leaving the world this time around!