One nice thing was that the author did a great job of weaving details from book one throughout the story as it started, so that I got caught up quickly with what happened in the first book, even thought it had been a year since I'd read it. I will concur with a fellow blogger, Nicole over at Feed Your Fiction Addiction who said that this one did not suffer from the usual sophomore slump that a lot of second books in a series have. There were a lot of twists and turns in this that I didn't necessarily see coming. There were betrayals galore! Some from people that made you very sad, and some from others. And in the end, some of those weren't quite as bad as I'd felt at first, and then the others were pretty major! Lots of mystery and intrigue in the court of the Lightspire king. Not to mention that the whole myth and reality of the magic the mages and people of this capital used was a big lie.

This was a good fantasy story, continuing an original idea from book one, and I'm now going to be eager to read book three. I guess I've got a year to wait!