I was mixed to negative about The House in the Cerulean Sea because at it's heart I don't think the book handled the moral conflict of a romance between what was essentially a victim and a perpetrator (which I'm not inherently against, but you need to deal with it if you're going to do it), and I wasn't really comfortable with Klune's inspiration for a fluffy romance being a cultural genocide that happened within living memory. That said, the kids were really cute, and I like the romance itself if I ignored the moral aspect (made easy by the book also doing that), so I wanted to see what happened, and I did want Arthur's point of view.

However, this one really centred how bad the agency was, and how much it was like the cultural genocide that happened here. And it was just so preachy and didactic, and the author was really running with the whole "What if JKR was actually Dolores Umbridge?" line. There's no amount of cute kids and sweet romance that was going to make me finish that. However, if you're willing to put up with all that, and just want Woobie!Arthur, I can recommend the sequel.