The whiteness, the bland, intentionally-vague-only-kinda-Scottishness, the heterosexuality, the too-precious children of the first book are even more in force in this one. It got to feeling a bit stifling. The idea of a divided nation brought together through understanding and mutual sacrifice is a fine fairy tale, especially given the stories that so clearly influenced this one, but it felt just a little too convenient and half-baked in the end to me.

The women and their strength are a highlight of this book, but the way it feels like all of them, even the champion single mom, have to be married and have good partnerships, just started to feel like marriage propaganda. I like the portrayals of marriage as needing to be equitable, and men needing to essentially stand aside for their women at times in their partnership, but to me it was very boring for every woman to be a wife and, with one exception, a mother.

I did not like the portrayal of the fae (oh, I’m sorry, ‘spirits,’) as essentially good if not for mortal interference, and willing to accept mortals as ruling over them, at all. The conversations around the exploitation of nature and how the spirits feel about it feels about as deep as a puddle. The finale resolutions seem to echo a certain philosophy of the world being man’s garden to tend that I don’t particularly like. In general, the magic is very vague and vibes-based.

When the action was high I did enjoy the book, although the antagonists are at best, boring and just cartoonishly mean and selfish for the sake of disrupting order and little else, and at worst, borderline incoherent. But it would be hard for them to be consistent in a world where the politics themselves feel more than a bit incoherent. I do not believe that two centuries of conflict could be solved the way it pans out.

There was just a lot of time that felt like it was people running around missing each other and not having conversations that needed to be had. There were pacing issues, and also a few too many instances of people finding things unbelievable, especially the guys. Maybe this was a meta conversation about how stupid men are, but at some point you have to wonder when someone is going to cease to be shocked about existing in the fantasy world they’ve lived in their whole lives, even when they discover something new.

This was competently written, I enjoy Rebecca Ross’s prose, but at some point I realized there was no way these oh-so-important marriages could actually be broken up, and I checked out mentally before the big finale. I don’t think this was an awful book for those who wanted to spend more time with the characters in the first one, but it’s nothing I would go out of my way for again. It all seems rather in service of the Heavenly Father which Ross once again shouted out in her afterward. It’s her right to do so, but it does cast a very strange shadow across the rest of the book in retrospect that I find impossible to ignore.

This feels like an attempt to write a ‘love conquers all’ type of story but there are no revolutionary elements, no real bite. Violence exists to be shocking and punished and forgiven, but there is no real discussion of healing work because the magic’s doing that. There’s no accountability and things wrap up quite neatly, which is exactly the fantasy I would come to expect from this author in context. I do not believe this story to be intentionally insidious, but I don’t feel convinced by its ethos, either. There are plenty of readers for whom this will be perfectly fine, but I’m not one of them.

Joking PS. It would have been better if Iagan and Ash were toxic yaoi, just sayin’.

ITEM: The favorite book series of your friend's husband who prefers gaming to reading, and prefers reading to wiping his ass or cooking a meal once in a goddamn while, Dillon. It has a cat in a tiara and a man in boxers running away from an explosion on the cover in bright, simple colors. It looks kind of outdated, like when everyone was making fake vintage movie posters in 2015. Remember the Dungeon Crawler Carl book? This is the second one of that.

Look, you should probably just be glad for anything that gets people reading and talking. It's not like this writer is super subtle about his political leanings. All of that misogyny and weirdness around race? That's like, totally supposed to be there, to make a point about how bad those things are and how we kind of tend to gloss over it. It's actually super-sympathetic! Duh.

CONTAINED IN THIS BOOK:

*Level 101 political rhetoric about how capitalism and specifically the entertainment industry fucks people over. Look, books just aren't allowed to not comment on that stuff anymore. You don't have to applaud it for that. *Some stuff about white nationalism and how that's weaponized by the nation of Israel??? But like, no one actually says the word Palestine in this, so there's no reason to get stressed about it. *Fun in the form of loot boxes, explosions, adorable pets and the occasional dick joke. We're still allowed to have fun these days, aren't we?

3.75 ⭐️

check trigger warnings BYR ~

experienced via audiobook

i appreciated what this book offered—a look inside the effervescent life of forest creatures and plant life in relation to the author’s life. the addition of real-life stories and realizations being compared to moments of queer💡and queer🏳️‍🌈 happenings within the natural world felt grounding, especially to me as someone who has close to no knowledge of nature other than what i’ve learned from morgan freeman-narrated documentaries.

my eyes opened in the first half of the book, finally wondering to myself why we separate the human world from the natural world, as if our existence should be othered; by doing so, by creating this divide from nature because our brains have engorged to a pompous size, we hinder our experience in many ways. because of the social norms we’ve placed on the human race, we’re bound to restrict ourselves and our way of thinking due to the fact that we don’t see ourselves aligned with all things natural. it’s curious to think about life this way!!

there were good points made about social dysfunction, a look into neurodivergence, seeing genocide happen within the social world and the natural world, and interesting facts about eels and birds and fungi all the same. i enjoyed hearing about the author’s life as well but nearing the last quarter of the book, it seemed to be a bit foggy and dragged on. i found myself slowly becoming uninterested. whether that was just me unable to focus on the subject matter or the book itself at that point, it’s hard to tell. but i have no issues with the material—most of it was quite fascinating.