Review copy provided by the publisher.
This is the second half of what is being called a duology, with The Witch Roads as the first half of the story. I would say it’s less a duology than a novel in two volumes. The first volume ends on a cliffhanger, and the second picks up basically immediately with no reintroduction to the characters, setting, and plot. So: one story in two volumes, now complete.
There were things I really liked about this and things that left me cold. I feel like the pacing was weird–the chapters are short, but that didn’t really obscure how many pages were spent on basically one argument. I also found the ending deeply unsatisfying–the situation of having a character possessing other people was basically glanced at as problematic and then embraced as a happy ending that was entirely too convenient for all involved.
But the return to our protagonist Elen’s past home, illuminating it with her adult eyes, was really well done, and I liked the courage and strength shown by the child she encountered there. I love having a fantasy that has an aunt/nephew relationship as one of its emotional cores. This duology simultaneously locates itself centrally in the secondary world fantasy genre of the moment and branches out to do things that I’m not seeing a lot of in other fantasy of this type.