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Unfortunately, the problems that I had in the first book in this series persisted here in Rebel Spring, making the overall reading experience so far one giant shoulder shrug. I cannot work up any amount of caring for these characters whose motivations and actions I feel are shallow and hollow.

Morgan Rhodes tries to lay out an expansive world with lots of political and magical problems but she undermines her own world by talking it to death. Every element of the world is spelled out in so many words and she repeats these explanations over and over again. Her writing is repetitive and plain. She falls into the traps of generic YA fantasy writing, describing almost every person as beautiful, almost every smile as half there and half genuine and we are always aware of what complex emotions are flashing through characters' eyes.

All elements of love here felt very awkward to me. It's not that I care that one character might be interested in more than one person. I'm firmly on team #PickBoth when it comes to love triangles and whatnot, but it seemed here that these tension-filled, longing stares always cropped up when there was more important stuff to be paying attention to.

King Gaius is the main antagonist and he's like one breath away from being cartoonishly evil. He does have power hunger kinds of motivations, but we'll chalk it up to the in-your-face writing again that that gets lost in all his I'M GONNA KILL YOU monologues and the mention of blood any time he is around. (Seriously, almost every time.)

Jonas is an idiot. He spends the entire book hemming and hawing about not wanting to act rashly and then all of a sudden, he thinks running into a room full of people who at least outwardly support the king, to kill him in public is a good idea. And then he actually runs into that room AND MONOLOGUES. It felt sudden, out of character, and doomed to fail. I would summarize Jonas's entire time in this book as doomed to fail.

Magnus is awful. He is not morally gray. He actively chooses to do bad thing and even if he's setting his jaw all hard, that does not make his behavior gray. Just because he force kisses Cleo, but it was a-little-bit-kind-of to save her, doesn't make him a good guy. Just because he hates his father secretly, doesn't soften the blow of his continual decisions to follow along with almost every thing his father says. Neither does it take away from the fact that Magnus' knee jerk reaction is to kill people. He doesn't deal well with rejection. He doesn't see what's right in front of him. Does he change? Who knows. But as of now, I want him to stop forever.

Cleo is probably my "favorite" but she's also sadly underused in this book and all of her scenes become repetitive as well. I honestly have nothing much else to say because I'm not sure what she did for 400 pages. If I had to summarize for her, it would be suffer and fake smile a lot.

Lucia is THE WORST. She's the worst for in and out of story reasons. I feel like Rhodes created this super powerful character that has to be pushed and pulled around a lot and it just reads like she's lacking intelligence. Like, girl. What do you MEAN your father has always treated you well? UM, DOES YOUR RECENT COMA RING A BELL?

In all, this is a collection of pretty good ideas that the author lacks the skill to truly bring to life, at least in any way that I would truly enjoy.