**I was provided a physical ARC by the publisher in exchange for honest review.**

Actual rating: 3.5

Evan Winter returns to The Burning series with his newest installment, The Fires of Vengeance. Readers continue to follow Tau on his quest for vengeance against those responsible for the death of his father. This book picks up very shortly after where book one left off, which makes just about all of its contents spoilers for book one.The neverending war for the land also continues and this time there is both the civil war of the Omehi and the ongoing war against the hedeni to face.

I basically read The Rage of Dragons and The Fires of Vengeance back to back, so I had the benefit of being up to speed on everything and not suffering from memory failure as to names or social structure for the world. This series does have a lot of names and words that readers have to keep track of (I didn't have particular difficulty, but Winter was kind enough to provide a glossary if you do).

I was very excited for an African-inspired high fantasy series built around a vengeance plot line. However, I found that there was a sort of formulaic structure between the two books. Introduction, training montage, minor boss battle, big boss battle, cliffhanger. I'm cool with that. If you're doing something well, keep at it. Works for urban fantasy, mystery/thriller, and romance writers among others, so there's no real reason it can't work here. I just kind of expected more than a formulaic structure from what is marketed as high fantasy.

I had thought that Hadith and Uduak were queer-coded in the first book, and I'm grateful that Winter took the time to make that clear. They were the characters I cared about in the first book, and they were still the characters I cared about in the sequel. I have relatively little attachment to a majority of the characters. That does impact my enjoyment of the series because it also means that I don't particularly mind if they're facing high stakes or the outcome of the conflict.

Battle scenes are a strength of Winter's which I am very much glad to see, since there are an awful lot of them. The balance of battle time to politicking and character development seemed to be very skewed in the direction of battle, which could cause issues for some readers.

Ultimately, I'm left kind of lukewarm about the series, which bums me out since I wanted to love it. I don't feel pressure to pick up another sequel since I'm not invested in the characters, despite the books being well-written and not doing anything particularly wrong. I would certainly not discourage people from reading the series and am not opposed to reading more of Winter's works in the future.