Eden Conquered

So much happens in this book. Actually, too much happens in this book. Eden Conquered falls victim to something a lot of fantasies fall victim to - too many events in too short of a time, with hand-waving to explain the timing. Princess Carys is supposedly “wandering the wilderness” after faking her death in the previous book, Dividing Eden. She's also supposed to be recovering from the withdrawal effects of the drug she was taking to cover the pain of being semi-regularly beaten while at home. (I'm not even going to get into why she, a Princess, was regularly beaten...it's weird.) And yet, beyond a few pages in the beginning, she doesn't seem to have any issues with the withdrawal, and the “wilderness” is never more than two day's horseback ride from anywhere she seems to need to get to. The “War” that we keep hearing about we never see in either book. The battlefield is...somewhere else. There's no real sense of time or distance, when it really feels as if there SHOULD be.

That aside, it's a pretty good sequel to Dividing Eden. I think it would have been more satisfying to have been a trilogy, with the second book about Carys wandering in exile and Andreus dealing with the treachery in his kingdom, and the third book about Carys coming back to Garden City and reuniting with her brother. Perhaps we could have delved more into what the Xhelozi monsters are, and why the city is based on “Virtues.” That's another problem I had, actually - they say, more than once, that the Xhelozi are strong because the Virtue of the city is weak, but never explain that. We don't really get into the mythology much. Had the duology been a trilogy, perhaps we could have explored their religion more as well. There's so much interesting world-building dangled just out of sight! As is, with only 300 pages, a secret is barely dangled in front of us before it's revealed, and tension doesn't have a chance to build properly.

It's a great story. It needed more space to be fleshed out.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.