2 stars
I won a free digital audiobook of this.
To be fair, I entered the giveaway without realizing this was the second book in the series, pulled in by the brightly-colored cover and intriguing title. I would definitely not recommend reading this without having read the first book. I had absolutely no idea what was going on half the time or who was who. I needed a detailed character map or something to figure out who anyone was. So confusing.
Sometimes you can get away with jumping into a series partway through if the book is interesting enough. This one just didn’t do it for me though. The audiobook was 24 hours long. And it dragged and dragged. It took me about a month to finish this book (despite the fact I drive a lot for work). I kept having to take breaks from listening because I just couldn’t get into the story.
There are multiple references to events that took place in the first book. Based on those, the first book sounds way more interesting. I feel like most of this book was just various people talking… or more specifically, arguing. More on that later. Not much really happened in the first three fourths of the book, then it majorly picks up at the end, but not quite enough to save it for me.
Most of the book is just courtly drama. It’s page after page of people arguing. Some of the magical elements were interesting, but were made less so by the arguing. There was a scene that took place on a flying freaking carpet and what do they do? Argue. How can you make a scene set on a magic carpet boring? Apparently just have your characters argue.
As other reviews have mentioned, lots of violence at the end. The plot goes full turbo in the last few chapters, but honestly I was so disconnected with the boring characters that I didn’t really care about their outcomes.
The writing was decent with some nice descriptions, but the plot was just not interesting to me.