I don't know where to start. I mean gosh. okay. for anyone who plays the Persona games this is kind of like how the ending of Persona 3 makes me feel. Happy and upset and hopeful and ambiguously okay with what happen. ( )

A solid follow-up to The Orphan Queen, which concludes the story of Wilhelmina Korte and her struggle to reclaim a lost kingdom. I enjoyed this book and was impressed by the pacing and tension throughout the story. I intend to look for more from this author. ( )

WOW!
Wow wow wow!
Even after three weeks, I'm still in shock from this book! It was heartbreaking, and painful, and so, SO GOOD! I am not okay.

Literally all I can think to say about this book is PAIN PAIN PAIN! Wonderful, beautiful, spectacular pain, but still pain! ( )

This is the immediate sequel to The Orphan Queen with events starting seconds after the cliff-hanger ending of the first book.

Wilhelmina Korte is the rightful heir, she feels, to the kingdom of Aecor which is now ruled over as a conquered territory by the Indigo Kingdom. In the first book of this duology she infiltrated the palace and tangled with the vigilante, Black Knife. At the heart of the politics of this world is ‘wraith’, a toxic by-product of magic, which is indiscriminately destroying lands and is currently advancing on the Indigo Kingdom.

Wilhelmina is a little bit more proactive in this book than the previous one, journeying into wraith-affected territory to see if she can find something that will halt or reverse the advance of wraith and she returns to Aecor to see how she can help her long-lost country from within. In the process she finds that her views on Aecor and the Indigo Kingdom have changed and she both gains new allies and loses old ones. Wil does continue her interactions with the mysterious Black Knife which are fun (if a little far-fetched).

I felt that, though the action continues straight on from [Orphan Queen], this book was better written - though it may be that the forbidden romance hook got me. I kept reading because I wanted to find out what happened there, as well as with Aecor and wraith.

I like the strong friendships and loyalties (unusually between same sexes as well as opposite sexes, which keep the series balanced) that Meadows depicts and also the calligraphy details; apparently she went so far as to learn calligraphy as research for this duology. I did find it frustrating, as a reader, that Wil didn’t use communication better; she could have got more information about wraith from Chrysalis and I wondered why she didn’t keep the enchantment on the 'entangled' books rather than shutting down those sources.

The solution to the problem of wraith was rather unexpected and I'm not quite sure how it really worked (one of those things that it’s best not to examine too closely, maybe). It does seem that wraith has not been conquered, and possibly there are more stories to come from other countries in this world. Wilhelmina’s story, though, has been satisfactorily resolved by the end of this book.

There are four prequel novellas, set two years before [Orphan Queen], which tell Tobiah's story; maybe I'll look out for those to read.

I'll give it 3.5 **** ( )

Okay, I'm kind of cover-fixated right now and I hate this one. This novel is much darker than that cover would lead one to believe.

Cover aside, though, I liked this one a lot. I was okay with The Orphan Queen, but something about this second volume just clicked and found myself marveling at Meadows's skills at world-building. There's not necessarily anything super-unique about her plot or characters, but she has created a rich world in which to place them, which elevates this above most YA fantasy. And while there may be nothing terribly unique about her characters, she imbues them with real depth and humanity, which also helps to set her apart from the crowd. ( )