Astrid Hawk

Read this in English as a child and somehow never read the original version even in French class. Looking forward to experiencing it in the author's original prose. (Goodreads does a terrible job with managing multiple-language editions of the same book... hope I can make this work.)

I probably shouldn't have expected any better given how I felt about the first book, but somehow I was still disappointed. I wouldn't read this unless it's free (it's on KU for now at least) and you actually liked the first book.

The few things I liked about the first book were absent from this one - there was very little of the military academy trope (Arden does go to class in the first half of the book, but for the most part she gets special treatment due to her relationship with Cyrus, and nearly every class she attends has a random exception to just allow the regime to f*k with the students). There is no longer any real dystopian element with state secrets and lies to uncover - the only secrets that are revealed are related to the gods and the war origin myths (which... frankly are quite flimsy).

It was impossible to care about or even feel outrage for any of the secondary characters - Arden's classmates, Cyrus's fellow royals, even the key Soalians. Arden's mother gets mostly a cursory appearance in a single scene, and Arden very easily dismisses her from her mind in favor of constantly going back to her Cyrus addiction. It feels like there are no connections at all to Arden's former life in the "real" civilian world.

The story itself stays very superficial, focused mostly on the push/pull between Cyrus and Arden, and their relationship continues to feel cringey and icky. Arden seems to have lost all of her personal agency and is driven only by her desire to preserve her relationship with Cyrus. The book introduces way too many tropes along the way that really don't serve to do anything except confuse the plot. As a result, this book continues the habit of the first book in having the characters behave in completely nonsensical ways in order to poorly tie things together. (For example, Arden gains the ability to wander around in spirit form, invisible and unheard, in this book... yet when it comes time for the climax, she goes wandering in her corporeal body, where of course she is discovered where she's not supposed to be, creating the ability for a major physical conflict. This whole scene wouldn't have happened if she'd simply wandered around as a spirit to do what she needed to do.) I was also annoyed by Arden's frequent juvenile interjections into her narration - such as "Wow wow wow" when someone says something mildly surprising that the author wants us to read as shocking.

I read this because I thought it was the conclusion to a duology, and figured I'd just knock it out since I started it. Unfortunately, it looks like it's intended to be a trilogy - this book cut off just as the main conflict was getting set up, and the ending felt very rushed and sloppy. Somehow despite my low expectations, I was still disappointed.

Read this in English as a child and somehow never read the original version even in French class. Looking forward to experiencing it in the author's original prose. (Goodreads does a terrible job with managing multiple-language editions of the same book... hope I can make this work.)