Loved it. I'll admit I liked the first one a bit more. If I could have given a 4.5 I would have, but rules are rules.

I loved the first book so much. It felt fresh and different with a strong voice and a good story. This book has all of those elements as well. I have only one small criticisms, and they are small, because again... I love this book. It felt like it slowed and lost a little momentum in the middle. But not enough that it made the book less enjoyable.

And then it picked up and just keep getting stronger right through the end. The good things far out weigh any minor criticisms. The characters keep getting better, the story pulls you along and I love how it develops. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes next. ( )

after reading the first book in this series, and really liking it, i read some commentary about the racism (that i completely missed) in the book. i was interested enough in where the story was going to pick this one up to see both what happened next, and to see if rivera addressed any of that criticism. (having missed literally all of the problematic issues in the first book, i wasn't sure i'd be able to pick up on if this one was better, though.)

so first, to the racism. i do think that she tried to address this here, but i could absolutely be mistaken that she handled it well. it seemed to me that she tried to fix what she'd done wrong in the first (although it also seems to me that they should reedit that first one to address the problems). still, i think that this book likely has far fewer issues. i'm unwilling to say that there aren't any, because i didn't catch any of the ones in the first book, as i know very little of the specifics about asian culture.

as to the book it self, this is primarily shizuka's story, that we didn't hear in the first book. what happened to her during those eight years she was apart from shefali. this was far less interesting to me than i expected it to be. mostly because this was so much about battling and fighting and i just don't tend to want to read about that. there's enough of shefali's story here, but all of that is demon-centered, and that's my least favorite aspect of the series. on top of that, the writing in this one isn't nearly as wonderful as it was in the first book. it's still well written, of course, but the style just isn't as exceptional. (or possibly i'm more used to it? this is quite long, all put together.)

so all told, story-wise, this held some interest for me (i particularly liked baozhai and how she factored in the story, in this one) for sure, but it just wasn't as good as the first. i don't think we got much more out of the characters than we had in the first either, although we do see them growing and changing a bit.

it feels like the third book is going to be all battle and shefali's death and the aftermath and i'm not too excited about that, but i will read it. ( )

Their Bright Ascendancy continues with a slower volume that focuses on its queer women protagonists to the near-exclusion of everything else.

I've been looking forward to The Phoenix Empress, second in the "Their Bright Ascendancy" series by K. Arsenault Rivera, for a while: as a sequel to The Tiger's Daughter, a book that I very much enjoyed despite its flaws, I was intrigued to see where the author would take both the plot and the form of this queer romance-heavy fantasy trilogy. Structurally, The Tiger's Daughter is an odd book, told mostly in the form of a second-person letter from Qorin warrior Barsalai Shefali to her wife, Hokkaran O-Shizuka (better known by the time the letter is written as Empress Yui). Shefali effectively retells the story of her childhood with Shizuka, moving between the steppes on which the Qorin people live and the royal Hokkaran palaces, their cross-cultural friendship enabled by the close relationship their own mothers had at the time of their birth. Shefali and Shizuka fall in love in a society where same-sex relationships are more or less taboo, particularly in Hokkaran culture, and their battles include the fight for acceptance as well as some actual battles with a plague of black-blooded contagious zombies from north of Hokkaro. Spoilers for The Tiger's Daughter will follow, so if you're not caught up, and you want to try a slow-burning epic fantasy with a same-sex relationship between women at its heart, this is the book for you.

The Phoenix Empress pick up almost exactly where its predecessor leaves off, and while the "present" takes up more of the narrative in this volume, there's still a substantial story-within-a-story as Shizuka fills Shefali in on the events that led to her becoming empress, not to mention developing an alcohol addiction and a severe phobia of water. Shefali has returned from her own travels even more changed, following events in that have led to her being contaminated by black blood but not succumbing to the usual progress of the illness, and now expects to die on her next birthday in four months' time. A great deal of the book is therefore based on learning each others' secrets and renewing their relationship, as well as working out what the wider implications of Shefali's return are for the future of Hokkaro and the black- blood plague.

Read the full review at: http://www.nerds-feather.com/2018/10/microreview-book-phoenix-empress-by-k.html ( )

Still beautiful; I still love it.

For various reasons, this took me ages to read. None of those reasons was related to the quality of the book itself, but I found it interesting that whenever I managed to pick up the book, no matter how little time I could read for, or how long it had been since I last read, it was still a delight to engage. Every line of this has grace and weight. Indeed, settling more into the weaknesses and strengths of our main characters, I found even more grace and weight and depth to this book than there was in the first, though the nesting narratives sit slightly less elegantly.

Basically, love it, cannot wait for more, am so glad these books exist. ( )