Han gripped his bo staff even tighter, slowly moving his feet into a defensive stance. “Something’s not right here,” he said in a low voice. “It all feels very . . . ghoulish.”
And that was when the undead attacked.

Oh yes, this book had zombies.

This was the fast-paced sequel to Zhara, book 1. We follow Zhara across the land on her journey to find the missing scrolls. That journey eventually leads to Ami, her father, and the Beast.

I still liked Zhara, she’s not the best character, but the best out of all the others. The new characters, Ami and Gaden (aka Beast) fell flat to me.

This series has good diversity, Ami is, what I assume Autistic, Gaden is non-binary trans, Han is demisexual (which is nice, that’s not represented nearly enough), and people are assumed non-binary until confirmation (pronouns are they/them until it’s known, which is actually the way it should be irl). All these good representations don’t make up for the fact that Ami and Gaden were one-dimensional to me. I couldn’t picture them in my head. Ami was supposed to be the most beautiful person but there were not many descriptions that allowed me to picture anything, and Gatans nickname had me picturing them as this obscure literal beast instead of a person. I couldn't get a reading on their physical description at all, so they were mostly a blob in my mind. I also did not like Gaden as a character, they were awful but I won’t get into that because it'd spoil the reveal/ending, but no, there were decisions they made that I did not like.

Han was still an idiot. Pretty sure an attempt was made to blame his stupidity and naivety on being demi, which was the worst, and I didn’t like that.

The plot was resolved easily like in book one, too easily. It screamed YOUNGADULT, which I know it's young adult, but no need to be so obvious lmao

Book three will follow princess Yulana and from the epilogue, will be an FF pairing, which hasn’t been done in the book yet, so more nice representation. However, I’m liking this series less and less so I’m not sure if I’ll bother with the next.

Thank you to the publisher, who needs to do so much better with their marketing department (like, come on), for the PR package and finished signed copy.