Not as good as the first but I still enjoyed it.

This had all of the ingredients that should have worked for me (an urban fantasy setting with unique magic, unique characters, dragons) but I really struggled to get into it. The prose was nice but I just found myself struggling to continue picking it up. I did end up finishing but the plot just felt a little too directionless for me with not enough proper stakes for the characters. I also wasn’t a huge fan of just how unseriously the characters took everything, I like a bit of humour but their glibness in response to everything just didn’t feel authentic. I liked the themes of conflict between old magic and new technology but the magic felt like it had a lot of missed potential- the characters don’t actually end up using it a huge amount and I feel like it could’ve been used for much more creative applications. Felivox was a very fun character but then just seemed to serve as a way to get the characters out of sticky situations without much consequence.

Such a fun writing style and characters!

Quite slow to begin with but I ended up enjoying this a lot! So much hidden depth and wonderfully memorable characters.

Heaven’s Graveyard was a fun, light-hearted book and was a nice break between heavier/more complex reads. We follow Coda (or Cod), an archaeologist with an obsession about the legendary hero Aleya Ana-Ulai and a desire to prove she was a real figure. Receiving a letter about a monumental discovery from her childhood mentor, she returns to her hometown but finds him dead in an apparently unfortunate accident. But Cod suspects that not all is as it seems. What discovery could be worth killing for?

Heaven’s Graveyard is set in the same world and ties into the events of one of Grace Curtis’ previous books, Idolfire, but I hadn’t read that before reading this one. It’s definitely not necessary to, but there were a lot of easter eggs and moments where it felt like the author was bringing attention to things and winking at the audience that I just didn’t get or appreciate so I think it would probably improve the experience to read Idolfire in the same way that it would improve the experience of reading Mistborn Era 2 if you read Era 1 first, though it’s definitely not needed to understand and appreciate the story. Speaking of the story, it was a lot of fun! I really liked the main character, Cod. Many of her flaws and struggles were really relatable like her struggles to connect with people and I also really liked how determined and decisive she was despite her fears and inexperience of the wider world. The supporting characters also all really worked, they all felt like they had hidden layers and messy motivations. The murder mystery plot didn’t actually take up a huge amount of page time, but I didn’t mind that because the other mystery plots surrounding the archaeological discoveries and Cod’s mother were also pretty engaging. The plot twists really got me in this one, I felt so blindsided even though in hindsight it should’ve been obvious!

The magic was a really interesting concept, though I felt like I was missing a bit of context and I didn’t quite understand how it worked, which may be because it was fleshed out more in Idolfire. It was still really fun and I loved how chaotic it was but it could have hit a bit harder if I’d understood it more. The worldbuilding also fell into a bit of confusion for me, because it’s the kind of thing I see often in books nowadays where it’s clearly set in a time period that’s meant to reflect the past but the time period is really hard to parse because the older technologies are surrounded by very modern language/turns of phrase. But I did really like the exploration of the effects of new technologies appearing and the effects of a world becoming more and more connected and globalised as these technologies appear, triggering conflict.

The pacing was a bit off quite slow to begin with and then everything was wrapped up really quickly at the end leaving me a bit unsatisfied. It felt like everything was just ultimately a bit too easy to fix and I would have liked more exploration of the wider consequences of the characters’ actions.

Overall, Heaven’s Graveyard was a really fun read. The writing style was clever and engaging, I loved the characters and the plot was full of mystery and twists even if I was a little dissatisfied with the resolution. Definitely pick this up if you’re looking for a light, quick, sapphic read with some fun twists and an interesting political backdrop.