Brienna has finally mastered one of the passions, Knowledge, and has a new adoptive father, David MacQuinn. She’s just been through a revolution to put a queen back on the throne, and so now works alongside Queen Kavanagh as her closet confident. While she gains the trust of her new family she must balance serving her country. Together with Cartier, who is returning back to his homeland after years away and rebuilding from the bottom up, they work together to ensure no one stands in the way of the Queen’s coronation. This novel was a step above the first in pretty much everything. The reader really liked this one. There was something different about it that kept the reader invested. Maybe it was the dual point of view from both Brienna and Cartier that made the story feel more fleshed out, but it worked very well. The first one felt like a mash of all types of fantasy novels we’ve seen in the last ten years, but this one felt like it left the heavier tropes at the door and just told a story. The plot was good because there were many twists and turns, betrayals with deceitful characters who the reader couldn’t trust, it was all a lot of fun to read. This actually didn’t go the way the reader had assumed it would. The way the first one ended made it seem like our main character was going to be queen, not that she’s to go on her own quest to help reign the rightful queen, so that was really intriguing. The pacing was good, it could get a bit slow at times, which could make the story drag a bit in parts, but overall it was a very compelling story. The characters were well developed and boy did we learn a lot about our main characters, especially Cartier. The fact that we were given his point of view this novel really gave us more to work with in terms of character development and world building because his family is a big part of the story and the fallout of power. This really opened the world building and let us understand everything a little bit more. Also Cartier’s relationship with this young boy was really sweet, it humanized him in a way that was missing in the first novel. Brienna also grew stronger in this as she learned of found and lost family. The new characters added really brought out the best and worst in our already established characters. In the end, this was an entertaining and exciting end to the duology.