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While this book kept me entertained, it was fine. There were parts I liked and there were more parts that I didn't really care for. I found the plot to be predictable and the pacing was off.  The characters, mainly Paedyn and Kai, were fine and it was interesting to see how their relationship developed. I will say that I wasn't too surprised by the ending. 

This is probably one of the best books I have ever read. I cried at the end for some reason. It's not really sad but it is if that makes sense. Also I would just like to say, I have been a Kitt hater since the beginning. I'm gonna go continue crying now.

I wanted to carry on with this series because this series has been all over the book community and trusting Booktok hits can either be hit or miss and this one was a hit.  

This book has two points of view. The first is Paedyn Grey, and she has survived the purging trials, but she has killed the King and people now know was born as an Ordinary. She has also kickstarted a Resistance through the kingdom of Ilya. She is on the run from the one person she had wanted to run to. She is determined to be free from Ilya and away from Kai and Kitt, but will she be able to stay one foot in front of Kai. The second point of view is Kai Azer, and he is now official Ilya’s enforcer, loyal to his brother Kitt, the new King. He has vowed to find Paedyn and bring her to justice. As long as he can keep his feelings in check for her because once he finds her, she will be sentenced to death. Across the deadly Scorches, and deep into the hostile city of Dor, Kai purses the one person he wishes he didn’t have to. But in a city with Elites, the balance between the hunter and hunted shifts – and the battle between duty and desire is deadly.  

This book was brilliantly written, and I enjoyed this book. I loved the characters – Kai and Paedyn were hilarious separately and together and how they were avoiding each other but then they didn’t want to avoid each other and wanted to be around each other. Paedyn could kick my ass and I would thank her for it. I love how blunt she was and how she didn’t give a shit who she was talking to. I loved her being in disgust as Shadow and yet she was kicking the ass of grown-ass men. Kai was still a golden retriever, and you knew he wasn’t going to kill Paedyn no matter what and how jealous he was getting over random ass strangers flirting with Paedyn. That man still needs to learn to hide his emotions better as he was a complete open book. The whole “let’s pretend” was so adorable but you could tell that Kai wasn’t pretending.  

My only issue was it was all still a bit predictable, just like the Maze Runner and the Scorch. The different being that WCKD was Kitt and that they didn’t want to kill her because they had other plans where Paedyn was just like if you are going to kill me, kill me quickly.  

The ending was cruel again and now I have to wait until NEXT YEAR for the next book. I hope Kitt doesn’t become cruel even though he was betrayed because it will just hurt my heart. Even though we could see glimpses of his cruelness hopefully he ends up standing up with Paedyn and fixing everything in time.  

Spice Rating: 🫑 / 5 🌶️

This sequel to Powerless was a similarly fun read in the romantasy series, though I believe it suffered a bit from "second book syndrome."

The trials have ended, and Paedyn is running for her life. The princes who once considered themselves friends of Paedyn are now hunting her down. Kitt finds himself in charge of the kingdom and sends the Enforcer, his brother Kai, to find Paedyn and bring her to him alive.

Readers get a few small snippets from Kitt's perspective alongside Kai's and Paedyn's points of view. The game of cat-and-mouse between Paedyn and Kai plays out multiple times throughout this novel, and this does get old after a while. What doesn't get old is the romantic tension between the two. The banter and near misses are top notch.

Though Reckless wasn't a 5 star read for me, that ending left me reeling. I'm going to read the next book regardless, but I do hope to see more plot in the third installment of the trilogy.

Editing was lacking. Lots of spelling/grammar errors. Places where the wrong form of a word was used (ex. using “due” instead of “due” or using “straitened” instead of “straightened”).  Very noticeable and distracting. 

Honestly the majority of the book was ok, but 75% was redundant.

We spend basically the first 75% flipping between Paedyn being the captive and Kai being the captive.

As such the plot never seems to progress. Especially since all this happens in basically the same setting. Basically nothing happens in the first 75% of the book which is too long. There’s also the matter of the weird data dump that is clearly because the author got a lot of criticism on book 1 for missing motivations. I think this book had a lot of potential it just missed the mark. 

Just a quick note before I get into my actual review of this book...if you're reading the first edition, you will notice it has a good number of spelling and grammatical errors (I do technical writing for a living so I notice these things and it was a bit distracting). I think the editors (or Lauren Roberts knowing how getting book edits are done. It could have been a poor choice of editor or she may have just purchased 1 or 2 edit pass throughs, which can cause the issues you see.) could have done a better job with editing before publishing so my review is not based on spelling and grammatical errors I noticed. These errors will probably be resolved in another edition so I am reviewing this with this factor removed from the equation.

I enjoyed this book so much more than its predecessor (Powerless). I thought Powerless was decent but Reckless had me sucked in. I haven't read a storyline like it and it kept me on my toes the entire time. I loved the adventure of it all since you saw more than just an arena, castle, and the slums of the kingdom and it felt like you were part of the story. I also liked Kitt's POV and felt it added more to the character as it seemed like his character was pretty important in the first book.
The ended literally wrecked (pun intended) me with the emotional damage along with another point in the book

(When Paedyn was reading her father's journal)

that Lauren Roberts gave me and that's fairly hard to do since I'm not emotionally invested in a book like I was with Reckless.

Very vague spoiler but I had a feeling the exact thing that happened at the end of Reckless was going to happen, but I blissfully ignored it hoping it would never come to be as I enjoyed the story.

Now I have to deal with this emotional damage and the thoughts going through my head as I have to wait 9 months for the final book, Fearless.

Maybe it's because the first book was extremely disappointing so I was expecting to hate this book so I was surprised I didn't, bit I found that I enjoyed this book far more than Powerless. Does this book suffer from some of the same annoying things Powerless did? Yes. But it was still an improvement.

Here's what I did like:

1. There was much less use of the word 'laugh' or 'laughter' or 'huffed out a laugh' in this book. Because in Powerless I'm certain it was on almost every page with Paedyn and Kai interacting. There was still way too much use of those words (we need to get Roberts a thesaurus or something) but it was used much less this time around and I'll take whatever win I can get.

2. Also I feel like the stakes felt higher and since there weren't a ton of side characters sprinkled in, we had more time with our main characters. Which was both good and bad. Because I liked Paedyn for the most part in this book. She didn't feel bad for what she did in Powerless when she killed the king, but she also had a lot of trauma from losing those she cared about.

3. The action scenes were pretty good. I think they were well written and I liked how Paedyn wasn't constantly relying on Kai to use his magic to save her (which happened a lot in the first book).

4. The fact that this book was shorter that the first book so I didn't feel like I was walking through molasses trying to read through it. 



Now onto the nitpicky and not-nitpicky things I didn't like about this book.

1. There were a lot of things that were repeated way too many times, to the point that it felt like I was being hit over the head with it. Examples being

Pae and Kai saying "Pretend" every page, or Paedyn constantly telling Kai she couldn't kill him because he would be "deadweight." or how Kitt's chapters always had the "maybe I am going mad" and "they think I'm mad" or some variation that was supposed to make us think he might be losing it even though it was so obvious that we all kind of knew he wasn't.

2. The fact that the narrative tried to make Kai's and Paedyn's actions seem similar, particularly with how they killed each other's fathers. Paedyn killing Kai's dad was literally her killing a power-hungry king who orchestrated mass genocide of a group of people who he deemed weak because they didn't have powers, and she killed him because he was trying to kill her first! Kai killing Paedyn's dad was him killing a Healer who wasn't a classist and couldn't be bought like all the other Healers, and he did so because Kai's dad, the power-hungry king, told him too. Like Kai is a victim but trying to act like those two deaths were the same just wasn't it.

I mostly say this because of the scene where Kai tells Payden "I didn't want to! I wasn't going to! He (her dad) was asleep, but then he woke up and I panicked and stabbed him and I was so disgusted with myself I threw up afterward." Like... okay? You felt guilty for killing an innocent man... as you should. He may not have had a choice, but his situation would cause different emotions (including guilt even though the guilt wasn't really his). In contrast, Paedyn killed a guy who straight-up orchestrated mass genocide... so I don't think she needs to be feeling too bad about that.

3. Kai's weird back and forth in this book. He flirted with her, true, but he also kept being like "I have a duty" as if that would make him blameless for his decisions to bring Paedyn in to presumably be imprisoned or executed. It was weird because it felt like he wanted to push Paedyn away and act like he didn't care, but then he'd flirt with her and try to get her to admit she cared for him. And normally I wouldn't mind that but the book never seems to mention how back and forth he is. 

4. This is Kai-related, but the epilogue and how Kai acted in it.

The epilogue pissed me off and made me dislike Kai because he went on and on about how much he cared for Paedyn but he doesn't seem ready to do anything about it. He's just accepting that his brother, who he doesn't think is mentally stable at the moment, wants to marry the woman he's head over heels for. And he's just like "I'll love her from afar because the beast doesn't get the beauty boohoo I'm so sad waahhh." Like stop being emo for two seconds and try to find out what's going on instead of stepping away! Like you told Paedyn you would work together and then you just take a step back when you get some shocking news? What?!

Overall I can't say this book was great or anything. I don't even know if I'll call it good, but it wasn't as bad as the first book, so that's a win. Do I care enough to continue to the third book? Meh. Not really. But I might just to see what happens.