finally finished this after starting it in january!

4.5 stars. i had to take a bit away from 5 full stars bc some parts of this book dragged on a little for me or i found it to be confusing at times, but otherwise i completely loved this book!

my favourite parts were definitely etta, sophia, and li min. there was so much girl power in this book and i absolutely loved the character development of etta and sophia. in passenger i called sophia problematic, but with this book we got to see her motives and hear her side of the story, which made me really love her character. and her and li min! what the heck i need more! a book about them would make suchhhh an amazing spinoff.

i also really loved nicholas and his honourable nerdiness, and julian every time he'd say some old fashioned thing. julian is such a dork, and getting to know his character was wonderful too.

literally every mention of alice made me want to cry, and i loved the conflict between etta and her parents, and ESPECIALLY how things ended.

the time travel was awesome and the alternate timelines blew my mind.

Oh my God. I can't. Beautiful.

3.5

I didn't love Passenger as much as I wanted to, but the cliffhanger ending made me want to check out the sequel. Since it's a duology, and not a longer series, I figured it wouldn't be too much time off my hands.

I liked Wayfarer much more than Passenger, but I had to purchase an audiobook in order to get through it because - once again, the long-winded writing style was threatening to defeat me. It's not bad, per say, but some passages of description and character introspection were just so unnecessarily long. I know a lot of people found it very lyrical and beautiful, and it was, but I found paragraph long introspection slightly overdone and so unnecessary. Half the time, I just wanted to shout 'Get to the point, woman!'.

Otherwise, the characters, the plot, the pacing, the settings were all great. All of them go through so much growth and development. There's a complexity to the relationships that made them feel very real. Etta and Nicolas spend most of the book apart, so instead of romance, we get a focus on friendships and familial relationships. Which I greatly preferred to the former.

The plot itself is amazingly complex and thrilling. There is so much danger and excitement and the characters don't really get a moment's rest. I think this is what redeemed the story so much to me and kept me going - even if I did have to resort to the audio book.

Overall, I'm glad I decided to give this book a chance. It was a great - if long-winded - conclusion to the duology.

Well that came full circle! Wasn’t as good as the first but it definitely tied up all the loose ends. I kind of wanted to know what happened with everyone more in depth but we get what we get I guess.

I forced myself to finish this book.

Oh my god this bored to to death. The final of the first book was already underwhelming and i had very low hopes for this one.

This book is just very confusing. There were times when i was like "but what's the plot? what are they supposed to do?". Nothing is explained and secrets are just dropped upon us out of nowhere. Every plot twist has very low impact because there's no explanation, so everytime the plot takes an unexcpected turn you're just like "okay that's it then".

There's a thousand explanation of "what the fuck is the astrolabe and what does it do?" and they are all contradicting each other. At the end of this book, we don't even know what was all that for.

This book was so slow, there are so much useless shit going on

Spoiler

like when Sophia and Nicolas go to Carthage and meet the Jacarandas??? What the fuck was that for?

We're in the dark most of the time and the downside of it is that you don't care about the characters anymore.

And also, something that enraged me, the introduction of new, under-developped characters:

Spoiler

the Belladonna and the ancient one or shadow or whatever the fuck he is

They are IMPORTANT to the plot but they just appear out of nowhere like david Copperfield and confuse you even further.

The ending is (as I expected) very confusing, very underwhelming. Because you can't have THAT MANY loose threads in your story and expect to wrap everything up nicely in the end.

Spoiler

that auction was just a shit show

The thing i loved the most about the first book is the characters. But here it's like they're just victims of the story, of the timelines, of other's actions. It's like everything that happened was supposed to happen, they didn't forge anything for their own, they just... enduring.

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Fans of Passenger will certainly be happy with Wayfarer. It picks up straight away after the cliffhanger ending and we follow Etta, Nicholas and their companions on their action-packed journeys.

As someone who had a lukewarm response to Passenger, Wayfarer did a good job of hooking me in. It took me a while to get into it but I was very pleased to return to these characters and enjoyed seeing them develop. It's also a wonderful example of a YA novel where love and romance is present, but as a minor side-plot/motivator for the characters, not the main focus.

Our protagonists are never fully in the loop about what's going on and as such, neither are we. It's a complicated plot with alternate timelines, the logistics and rules governing the travelers' abilities and lots of lies and deception causing quite a bit of confusion. It's most enjoyable if you're able to invest some time in this book and pay attention so you don't lose track! As the plot builds we get more and more answers and start to see the grand scheme of things. The ending is satisfying and I appreciated the way multiple storylines merged together.

Review to come. 4.5 stars.

We are, all of us, on our own journeys.

4 stars

Why, why, why must this story be a duology?! I could definitely have read a thousand books about Nicholas and Etta OR Li Min and Sophia OR the travelers in general.
I really enjoyed the second book but unfortunately not as much as [b:Passenger|20983362|Passenger (Passenger, #1)|Alexandra Bracken|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1446749751s/20983362.jpg|40360384] before. The story just felt a bit rushed sometimes, especially towards the end.
Still, Nicholas und Etta were as amazing as before - I liked how they grew and evolved in the second book. I didn't like that they were separated for most of it though. But Nicholas teaming up with Li Min and Sophia was really cool, as well as pairing Julian and Etta with each other.
ALSO WE HAVE LGBTQ+ AND POC REPRESENTATION, so yaaaaaay!!! Bracken also did a pretty good job at showing the oppression that Nicholas, Li Min and also Sophia had to endure.
The ending confused me a bit and I think more explanation would have helped here, but at least I got my happy ending - I still think that a third book would have been really perfect for telling this amazing, thrilling story.

3.5.

Definitely enjoyed this more than the first.

I just did not really enjoy these books all that much. The time traveling rules and stuff got too confusing for me. By the end I didn’t really care what happened to the characters because they kept making stupid decisions. I’ve loved everything else from Alexandra Bracken, but this just wasn’t for me.