It’s time for the Tournament of Blades, the annual
celebration where all the magical families of Cloudburst Falls send champions
to compete for the hefty cash prize (and, more importantly to the families but
not for Lila, the prestige). It’s a major tourist event and there’s no way it
can’t go ahead
Even if one of the competitors seems to be trying to kill
the competition.
Both Lila and Devon are competing for the Sinclair family,
giving them a double motive to win – and to stay alive and find out who is
behind it.
This is the second book in the series and I think it is
an excellent next step. This book took the story above and beyond the first
and helped banish some of the parallels with the Elemental Assassins Series that I found so strong before. This book
took the excellent foundation of the first and expanded it and cemented this
book as its own.
I’m honestly kind of frustrated with this review because
all I really have is a lot of well deserved but somewhat vague praise.
I love the world building, it’s very original with the
combination of noble houses who run this town, each of them controlled by
magical people all vying against each other, a modern setting and a range of monsters
lurking around the fringes of a tourist trap. I like the combination of both
the dark danger hiding behind every corner and the bright, shiny exterior which
is all welcoming and kitsch for the tourists. It’s a wonderful juxtaposition,
the pageantry with the lethal politics lurking just under the surface.
I love the protagonist Lila, with her endless love of
bacon and her complicated relationship with the family. Her conflict about being
both part of the Sinclair family and outside of it is excellent. Her conflict
over whether she can trust the head of the family, whether she can really get invested
in it and whether she can really establish any connections there. Her conflict
is very real as she both wants to protect and help the family but still feels
she needs to be ready to leave at any time and all of this is linked to her
complicated memories of her mother who was both loyal to the Sinclairs – and died
because of that loyalty. On top this we have her life as a thief, her habit of
keeping her head low and hiding and now she’s very much thrust into the lime
light, drawing lots of attention and being really uncomfortable about it. This past
also comes with an experience of being poor – so even when in two minds about the
Sinclairs, their wealth and the comfort she lives in now are not things she can
step aside from. I like how well this is down, Lila never feels like she’s
greedy or grasping – she feels exactly like what she is, a character who knows
poverty and is unwilling to dismiss the security of wealth. She’s a character
with a lot of interesting and very real conflicts about her.
The one element I didn’t like about her was her romance
with Devon. It feels very forced – along with the whole “I can’t possibly fall
in love with him for REASONS!” It’s like we have this whole excellent story and
then someone’s looked up some checklist and announced “this needs a romance. A female
protagonist must have a rocky romance. It is known. It is in the rules” so
Devon and Lila became a thing – only not a thing because there has to be some
barrier (Lila is reluctant… for… reasons).
Other romances in the book I liked, especially the
romance between Felix and Deah. Not because I especially like the romance and
Romeo and Juliet has been done so often, but I appreciated an attempt to make
some members of the Draconi family redeemable (unfortunately the general
characterisation of the bad guys is terribad people who are bad. Nuanced it is
not but, at the same time, while they’re terribad they’re not necessarily
cartoonishly so). Even better, while Deah is showed as redeemable and complex
and not just one of the evil Draconi, she is also shown as such through avenues
other than her relationship with Felix. Her love interest isn’t what makes her
good or her avenue for redemption or anything like that.
I can’t say the same about Felix and Katia – I don’t
think that the romance really added anything since Katia Already had the
excellent conflict with Deah and the characterisation of her father (though, I
have to say, I’m not entirely thrilled with Katia’s alcoholic father being
presented as the ultimate source of all that is wrong in her life especially
since we saw little about him other than being a drunk). Again, it felt like
romantic conflict was squeezed in because it must be!
That said, the characterisation of the other characters
largely worked. I wasn’t fond of the romance, but Katia and Deah both had powerful
family conflicts that really worked for them. The Sinclair family had a number
of excellent close bonds and we had some excellent past insight into a lot of
the main characters’ history which worked nicely in making it all richer.
The plot itself is fun, albeit predictable. I think I knew
both what was happening and who was doing it before we reached the half way
point. Despite that, I’m not complaining because the details of the journey
were still interesting, the character development excellent and the world
building was nicely advanced as well. The action scenes were fun, excellently
paced and exciting (Jennifer Estep is awesome at action scenes) as was the
actual unfolding of the plot itself. It’s well written and fun, being
predictable isn’t necessarily a bad thing – you may know the end of the path
but that doesn’t mean walking down it isn’t still fun.
Minority-wise, Felix is one of the main characters in
this series and he is Latino. He’s notable and definitely involved and really
only behind Lila and Devon in involvement in the plot. Lila’s mentor/father
figure, Mo is still present but is still kind of background. He does now have a
prominent position in the family and he has had a history revealed that
connects him more with the other characters – I’d like to see more of him than
just the protagonist supporter. I’d also like to see more of Poppy, an Asian
member of one of the other houses who only really had the briefest appearance.
I’d like to see more of Poppy because she’s also the only
woman who Lila has an uncomplicated relationship with. There are several
powerful and capable female characters in the series, but none of them really
like each other. Lila is wary and untrusting of Claudia (and has the classic
protagonist-snark-against-authority thing going) the head of Sinclaire house.
She and Deah have obvious issues to work through and the whole rival houses
thing is a barrier. And Katia had her own conflicts. I would like to see more
Poppy so Lila can actually spend time with a woman she likes. I want to stress
that all these other women aren’t terribad awful (so often a female protagonist
will be surrounded by evil terror ladies) but they all have story reasons for…
distance between them and Lila. Sadly, there are still no LGBT characters in
the series.
I liked this book, but I knew I would. I was eager to
pick it up the minute I saw it had been released and I wasn’t disappointed for
one second. This book tells me this is going to be another series on my must
read list – one I always look eagerly for and am quick to read when I get my
hands on it.
