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’.

Heartbreaking, raw, and insightful, Liebegott draws connections between all of the intertwining tendrils of grief. I sobbed my way through this collection.

There were definitely problems with the plot (and the mildly unhealthy co-dependency between Jamie and Edgar 🫠) but I still had a good time.