Heart So Fierce and Broken

Book Three Please.

The moment I finished A Curse So Dark and Lonely, I knew I needed A Heart So Fierce and Broken right then and there. And I was a bit skeptical about the new introduction of a point-of-view character because I had hopes for a certain guardsman and princess to be the end game. But by the end of this book, I realized that I loved it even more than the first one! I was actually excited because the release date was January 7th of 2020 and that is the Macedonian Christmas and I bought it sadly it took me way too long to read it.


A Heart So Fierce and Broken introduces Lia Mara, daughter of the queen of the bordering lands, a nation determined to take on Emberfall even if it means war. On her own, I really loved her character and my only real hang-up was that I spent how many pages in the first book getting to know Harper so when I first heard Grey would be a main Point of view in the sequel, I thought it would be him and Harper.
I'm glad it wasn't.

Lia Mara has been the cast-off her entire life but she finally gets to shine. I loved watching this intelligent young woman leave her family's shadow and really hold her own. And Grey was amazing as always, his internal conflict between duty and what he thinks is right was balanced just so, not overwhelming the story with unnecessary monologues and such.

But while I loved Grey and Lia Mara, even more than Harper and Rhen, bringing them to the forefront seemed to take away from the first couple. Rhen, while I wasn't a huge fan of him, was tolerable in A Curse So Dark and Lonely, but in this sequel he was cruel. His actions didn't match up to the character we spent hundreds of pages getting to know in the last book and I didn't understand why he changed. And Harper, who I thought was a fantastic heroine, all but drifted off the page. I felt like their characters were sacrificed for the sake of Grey and Lia Mara which makes me wonder where things are going in the next book.

Speaking of the story, as much as I wanted this sequel (mostly because of Grey), I didn't understand where the story could go after ACSDAL (which, if you cut a single moment at the end, could have worked pretty well as a standalone). But Kemmerer found a story and I wasn't 100% sold on it the whole time. It felt like two conflicts going in the beginning and I sat around waiting for something to happen on either front. This book almost feels like a “response” to the first one's “call” (action/reaction, cause and effect) rather than a continuation, if that makes sense. I definitely wouldn't recommend reading A Heart So Fierce and Broken without reading A Curse So Dark and Lonely. The backstory established in the first book is too important in the sequel. But this book very much felt like a reaction rather than its own story.

ALL THAT SAID, yes, I actually enjoyed this book even more than A Curse So Dark and Lonely. Which seems impossible based on everything I just said but it's the characters. Lia Mara had my attention from the first page and only continued to keep me reading, and I was already a fan of Grey from the last book so not much work was needed there. Despite not feeling like much really happened in this 400+ page book, it was the little things that added up and I am definitely interested to see how these two books come together in the third installment!