The first book was good. This one was BETTER and I loved that! I enjoyed reading the first book but THIS one I kept reading until I couldn’t keep my eyes open 😂. Often they say a sequel in a trilogy lacks but I actually enjoy most of the second books in the trilogies that I’ve read. 

It has a dual pov which I do love – dual/multi-povs. The previous book also had it but I enjoyed it more here because we could go from Lor hating Nadir to Nadir’s pov being like “damn, she’s hot” 😂. That was also fun for me because I DO like that transition in dual povs from the one person hating the other person and then it switches to the second pov where they’re thinking “hate” but also “hot” – it’s always entertaining and makes for good banter.  

Lor and Nadir just grow more fun in this one. We also get to see more growth from them, which I liked. Lor grew more into herself – realised what kind of a person she could be if she believed in herself and set her mind to it. I’m looking forward to the third book to see how she grows even more. 

And Nadir – we definitely got more of his personality than in the first book and I enjoyed seeing all of it. Although he does present and hold himself to be a cold person I liked that we got to know the warmer side of him – and then the very warm (hot) side of him 😅 
 

Of course, this being a romance book I can’t not talk about the romance in this. My favourite – enemies to lovers and Tuli’s done it really well! Which made the reading of it all the better and my flying through it was definitely also due to the good writing of the trope. I think many writers think that because they like reading the trope they’ll automatically be good at writing it. It’s very much not that and more to do with how well the author understands the trope (and also if the author is a good writer as well). 

I was grinning through most of their scenes because they were mostly filled with hate banter which then turned into… other types of banter 😂 but still had those notes of the hate banter – which I’m glad she kept in. Tuli can most certainly write an enemies-to-lovers romance any day because I’ll be seated for it all. 

I did have an issue with the flashback scenes, though. I felt like they weren’t written the best that they could’ve been? Like I saw what Tuli could do with the present scenes so I knew what she was capable of, but it didn’t cross over so much to the flashback scenes. I think maybe the issue was that she was trying to write “old” – as in the writing you have in high/epic fantasy that takes like 5 sentences to say one thing – and it didn’t work out that well? Which I understand because I purposefully write causally fantasy because I don’t want to sit and figure out how to write like that 😄. 
 

I can’t say much about the plot because being a sequel I don’t want to give away anything but I really liked how it immediately picked up where the first book left off. I would’ve liked more attention given to the Sun Realm but maybe Tuli’s keeping that for the third book.