I am apprehensive on starting this! Morning Star was so good, can he really keep going and top it? My heart rate still hasn’t come down from the last book!

Wow, Darrow really stepped in it this time. Pissed off Dancer, Sefi, and his wife in one afternoon. He really is spectacularly good at doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. In this one we get multiple narrators- Lysander, Lyria, Darrow, and Ephraim bringing us along their journeys. I’ll admit, I wasn’t enthused on this feature when I first started to read the book. Damned if Pierce Brown pulled it off. The audacity of this man to be this good, I tell you, it should be illegal. But I digress. With the multiple POVs we get our first glimpse into the reality of what Reaper really brought for the society. It’s not the rosy, equal future it was supposed to be. And there’s another threat on the horizon other than the Ash Lord, the Red Hands. We get an idea of the sweeping arc Brown has planned for this next trilogy. The real question is, will Darrow ever not step in crap on his way to glory?

This one hit hard. Not just the parallels to reality, but seeing the erosion of man and myth. All of the choices begin to add up and the final bill is steep. Not as much high energy action (which after Morning Star is a good thing), but you start to see the long threads being pulled together slowly across the multiple narrators. There is a great sadness between the lines. All they’ve lost and the cost of what they’ve won. Despite being fiction, it sits heavy on my heart. Don’t get me wrong, the series is still outstanding. But I might take a breather before reading the next one.