I found this book to be a bit of a disappointment after the first one. I gave the first book a light four stars for the worldbuilding, but this one is really at a generous three stars. My main issue with this book was that it meandered quite a bit. There was clearly an ending that the author was aiming for, but it really did feel like she was just trying to fill space between resolving the cliffy from the end of the first book and the ending that she was trying to write towards. This sequel very much did not need to be 494 pages, and I often found myself sort of drifting towards boredom at various points in the middle of this book.

tl;dr After the events of the first book, Jack and Adaira have been separated and must find a way to come together again. Beyond those troubles, the spirits are not only starting to chafe against their king's tyranny, but they are also suffering from a blighted illness that is crossing into the human realms. It may take cooperation across the whole isle (and a little music) to deal with the illness as well as to save the Isle of Cadence, spirits and humans alike, from Bane's anger.

In the first book, I had really wanted the spirts to play a bigger role rather than only appearing when Jack had summoned them with his harp. In this book, the spirits played a much bigger role, which I enjoyed...but it was a little bit too little, too late. For all that the characters talked about how important the spirits were in the first book, they really did not feature as much as I had thought they would, so the fact that they were so heavily featured in the sequel made it feel unbalanced across the duology as a whole. That said, I did enjoy the new spirit characters, especially Hap and Ash, and I enjoyed how the spirits and humans had to work together in order to deal with the blight and defeat Bane.

I also found that the characters really felt like they were retreading old ground from the first book, especially Torin and Sidra. In the first book, Torin was injured by a knife with a silencing enchantment on it so that he had to be silent, which led to his character development in terms of appreciating his wife and what he had more and to let his anger go. In this book, Torin ends up stuck in the spirit realm and is able to see Sidra while she can not see him; through this experience, he learns to...appreciate his wife more and let go of his anger. It really just felt like the exact same story for this pairing that was told a different way, which was a little frustrating because I was like "Didn't he already learn this lesson once??"

Jack and Adaira had a slightly different story in that obviously, they started this book already together and married, but I just found that I didn't...care that much about it? I don't know if it's because I'm just very much not a romantasy person or because they were bland people, but I found their sections to just be pretty boring. They were each other's strength and compensated for each other's weakness and pushed each other to be their best selves, blah blah blah. I obviously don't want drama for the sake of drama, but it just felt like it was lacking a sense of conflict. All the conflict came from the plot, which normally I probably would have been fine with (it's not like I don't like happy couples!) but the plot felt too weak to hold up the whole book.

Honestly, this book felt a little extraneous. The author obviously needed to resolve the cliffhanger, but if things in the first book had been tied up differently and maybe been a bit longer, I think the whole story could have been written as one book. Honestly, the blight and the spirits could have made up the plot of the first book, and the truth of Adaira's parentage could have come out that way; Moray had always felt like a weird loose thread that didn't quite fit, both in that book and here, and all the main plot points could still have been hit. And that way, the spirits could have played a bigger role from the beginning of the series.

I will say that I did enjoy some parts of this plot. I really liked the island coming together to deal with Bane, the illness, and just building relationships, and the way that the Lairds of the East and West led by example. I found myself really liking and respecting Innes and the way that she pushed herself to grow beyond her prejudices because of her newfound daughter. And I enjoyed the background of how Bane came to be and how Jack used his own musical abilities to face him. The folklore aspect of this story was still great, and I really enjoyed the parallels between Torin/Sidra and Innes/David as well as Jack finally getting to reunite with his father.

Was this worth a read? Eh. I was curious about how the threads from the first book would be resolved, but I don't know that it was worth the read per se. Sadly, I don't know that this author is for me; I probably could have just read a summary of this book and been perfectly happy.

See my Elements of Cadence series reviews:

A River Enchanted (#1) | here A Fire Endless (#2) | here

This book is a perfect niche read for anyone interested in biology and its branches, if you like ecology you're in for a treat 🤣

I really enjoyed how the author presented each different illness, mixing scientific lingo with anecdotes about how the illness affected a population, making the whole experience very immersive and educational (I learned a crazy lot about AIDS and coronaviruses 🤔)

A biiiiig con for me, though, was the lenght: sometimes the author drags things a bit too much for my taste, and I feel like some chapters could have been a bit shorter, so I had to take a mini break to tackle it again with enthusiasm 🤣

Still, one of my new fav nonfiction books 💙