paperback, 496 pages
Published June 15, 2014 by Square Fish.
Hunted across the True Sea and haunted by the lives she took on the Fold, Alina must try to make a life with Mal in an unfamiliar land, all while keeping her identity as the Sun Summoner a secret.
The first book had a decent pace and a lot of things happened to keep it going. In the second part of the series, the characters go from flawed to annoying and dumb. It's a bit of a shame given that there was so much room for character development, but i actually had to put the book aside for a bit because it was getting too frustrating to follow the journey of dumb people
This one lags in some places, but that's pretty typical for the second book in a series. It's well worth the slower parts to move ahead in the overall story. The world and characters are so engaging you'll put up with anything to find out what happens to them.
Other than one ongoing plot line, I think this book is better than the original, not that the original was bad. It gets off to a bumpy start as it course corrects from the ending of the first book, but soon settles into a well-paced story. That course correction is necessary because the ending of the first book was written before the second book had been plotted, when it wasn't clear whether or not there was to be a second book. The end result is a couple of chapters at the end of the last book, and the beginning of this one, that serve no useful purpose to the overall story.
About that one plot line:
Mal and Alina are in a toxic relationship, but the author doesn't seem to realize it. Yes, both the Darkling and Nikolai are trying to poison it, but it would be toxic even without …
Other than one ongoing plot line, I think this book is better than the original, not that the original was bad. It gets off to a bumpy start as it course corrects from the ending of the first book, but soon settles into a well-paced story. That course correction is necessary because the ending of the first book was written before the second book had been plotted, when it wasn't clear whether or not there was to be a second book. The end result is a couple of chapters at the end of the last book, and the beginning of this one, that serve no useful purpose to the overall story.
About that one plot line:
Mal and Alina are in a toxic relationship, but the author doesn't seem to realize it. Yes, both the Darkling and Nikolai are trying to poison it, but it would be toxic even without their meddling, or rather, their meddling wouldn't have much effect if it wasn't toxic to begin with.
Better than the first book in the series, but still nowhere near as good as Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom. I think reading those books before the Grisha trilogy has really soured my experience of these books.
