Synopsis:
Follow the law and you’ll stay safe. But what if the law betrays you?
It all started with the girl from the river: mutilated, tattooed, murdered. Tashué couldn’t help but look for answers and in the process, he uncovered the ugly truths being hidden by the very law he used to believe in—the law of the Authority.
Now he’s fighting for his life. Mere survival isn’t enough; he desperately wants to save his son from the Authority, and he wants revolution. At any cost.
Davik Kaine has been gathering power under everyone’s noses. Ruthless, ambitious, with a rebel army backing him, he wants revolution, too. He’s probably the only person powerful enough to protect Tashué from the looming implosion of the political field. And he’s the only person with the connections to save Jason.
He may also be responsible for the death of the girl from the river.
Is making peace with Davik worth it, if it saves Tashué’s son from the Authority?
If Tashué plays along with what Davik wants, can Tashué get retribution for the girl from the river?
Review:
I loved the first book in this series (Legacy of the Brightwash), but I’ve been procrastinating on this sequel just due to its length. It’s a massive book, and most of the time, I have to be in the right mindset for a book this size in order to properly enjoy it.
The first 18-20% of this book occurs prior to the end of Legacy of the Brightwash, and that shift away from chronological order threw me a bit at first. The POVs featured in that section were different than those from the same time period in book 1, and there were a few key details revealed here (subtle ones!) that came back into play at the very end. I loved that the story circled back as it did and everything really fell into place during the final chapter.
But because that first 20% was set chronologically before the end of book one, I was impatient to get to what happened after that mark. I don’t think the first 20% was slow, exactly, but it wasn’t the part of the story I wanted to be reading, which made it feel slower.
Anyway… Once past that point, things got a lot more exciting and I finally got to see what happened after that cliffhanger ending the author left us with at the end of Brightwash. Yes, it was worth the wait.
What I love most about this series are the characters. Every single one of them is unique and dynamic, and the author has a way of making you really feel for them, no matter their role in the story. And that story is pretty dark in places, but it’s the characters that keep me coming back. That part of the book was really well done. I think my favorite from this book was Lorne, though Ishmael is a pretty fascinating character too.
And the worldbuilding… The world of the Dominion feels so lived in, so real, that it’s the perfect backdrop for those characters I love so much. There’s the Authority, whose sole purpose is to keep the Talented/Tainted in line and suppress any dissent from them at any cost. There are the various political figures, each vying for their own projects and promoting their own schemes. The common people, caught in between, simply trying to live their lives and keep beneath the radar of those who would hurt or oppress. And in the background, the Red Dawn, a rebel organization with its own mysterious endgame. It all fits together so well.
Overall, this was a good sequel, and I’m looking forward to the next one.
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