This book was a vapid disappointment :(. Spoilers ahead:
The first book built a rich, intriguing world, and worked to quickly assemble a stellar team of heroines... And then this book scattered the team, returned the protagonist to her decimated hometown (which she knew was a lost cause, but felt a desire to confirm with her own eyes), and saw the secondary protagonist locked in her room for 60% of the book. What "twists" there were in the plot, were easily predicted from book one by anyone who has ever read a fantasy book. And considering this book series was a contemporary of The Avengers and Harry Potter, the central conflict of "We need to find the Mcguffin before The Bad Guy does" isn't even original. Lastly, I know I'm not the target audience for this book, but there was a lot of Telling instead of Showing. Something would be easily inferred by context clues or body language, and then immediately repeated in expository dialogue, sometimes in actual mind-reading. No matter the age demographic, it upsets me when a book dumbs itself down for its audience; an author should always trust their reader.