As a fan of Red Queen, I knew this book would be good but damn, it was better than good. I loved the worldbuilding and deep descriptions of each of the different landmarks and people within Allward. The ragtag group of people this follows are all going from different backgrounds and are all of the varying ages which I really enjoyed. This group makes up the heroes of the story, when in fact they are only the heroes because the first group of heroes failed, I have never read a book like that before. The humor was layered on top of tension and that just made it perfect. Aveyard has given us a more easily understood version of the Lord of the Rings and it is an ode to Tolkien's masterpiece, showing just how far the Fantasy genre has grown.