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.

Lowkey felt like as many possibly romantasy tropes were being hurriedly smushed in as possible, definitely not even close in depth of characters and storyline than Powerless— but that ending…. Oh my god…..