Mostly a successful sequel, tho the middle loses the plot for a while. Love the diverse, morally grey cast of antiheroes, collaborators, diplomats, revolutionaries, ex-pats, spies & bohemians. Fantastic verisimilitude and atmosphere.

This was definitely the most difficult book of the series for me to get through. It’s slow and steamy and sultry, taking place in Porachis, a luxurious country that echoes all the glamor and excess of Bollywood, which is a stark contrast to the bleakness of Amberlough City. But the story itself isn’t a glamorous one. It skips a couple years into the future, all of the characters we met in the last book are separated and living new lives, and the entire country is in the midst of complete political upheaval.
In this book, we meet Lillian DePaul, Cyril’s disgraced diplomat sister, and her estranged lover Jinadh. I like Jinadh, and their surly young son Stephen, whose “kidnapping” is the main conflict of this book, but I found Lillian incredibly boring, especially when trying and failing at light espionage. Her parts slowed down the story quite a bit for me. I do, however, love Cordelia’s arc in this book—she is a female character with a lot of more depth, and her story took a direction I didn’t anticipate.
This book is for the patient reader, one who doesn’t mind a very slow burn. It was just a little too slow for me.

DNF

I've been trying for over 3 months to get into this narrative.

Countless times have I picked it up to put it back down again.

I think it's time to just call it.

My apologies to the author, the publisher and NetGalley. Perhaps one day I will pick this up again and want to center punch this version of myself but today is not that day.

A copy was provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

First and foremost, I only made it through 1/2 the book before having to put it down and take a break. I wanted to enjoy it! The premise is fascinating, the characters struck my interest, however the writing felt extremely heavy handed. I found myself flipping back chapters to recall what the names of characters were and places. It felt like a slog. Bombardment of a million complex names and concepts to start up a story has always been a drag for me, so it's probable its personal preference. It was an interesting enough story that I will likely return to it at a later date and start again, but certainly not a light, before bed read or one that can be read with partial attention.

I had such a hard time with this series, and after looking around on the internet, I realize it's me, not the books. I just don't like spy thrillers. I had no idea whatsoever that this was the case. The books are speedy, beautifully designed, and characterized with care, but man oh man they are not for me.

I absolutely love this series so, so much - if you haven't read Amberlough, then you need to read it, and then immediately read Armistice afterwards. Lots of spycraft, intrigue, and a world reminiscent of 1930s Bollywood. Love it, love it, love it.

Armistice is a wonderful sequel to Amberlough. It picks up the story after the powder keg has blown and the characters have each run to where they thought was safe, if only for a moment. Although they are scattered, the thread that binds them is their wish to return to Amberlough City in Gedda. In order to do that they will have to oust the Fascist regime that has taken Gedda to add to its "One Nation". With this many characters in many locations getting the gang back together involves a lot of adventures and narrow escapes. Looking forward to the concluding volume of the series.

Thank you to netgalley I received this as an ARC. I enjoyed it very much was good solid read. Solid 3 Stars for me!

“You've no idea what you've cost me. Not the faintest trace of an understanding.”

In the aftermath of the fabulous Amberlough, I was worried I would be let down by this book. I was. But thankfully, not completely.

This one follows Cordelia and Aristide, two of the three leads of book one, and Lillian, an ambassador for Gedda… and Cyril’s sister. Ari is a traumatized refugee. Cordelia is in hiding after a resistance bombing campaign. Lillian is being blackmailed. But as things get more complicated, Lillian will have to risk it all to save her son.

It took me a while to really get used to the worldbuilding of this; while book one was set almost exclusively in Amberlough, one of the provinces of Gedda, Armistice is set in Porachis, a nearby country, which conveniently is not depicted on the map. We also get little snippets of information about nations like Liso that I found hard to keep up with and sometimes convoluted. And I still could not fucking tell you where Liso is.

And added on to that, the character cast is huge. There’s Daoud, Ari’s new lover, Jinadh, Lillian’s ex-lover and a prince of Porachis, Memmediv, Lillian’s maybe-current lover and a possible traitor for the Tatie province, Pulan, the head of Ari’s movie-making company, Sofie & Mab, two wives and undercover operatives, and a few more.

As a result of these two aspects, I found the plot overall somewhat hard to track, and found it hard to be invested in action I didn’t always understand.

I will say I really liked Lillian’s character direction; since the other two characters are old, I didn't feel they progressed as much. But she grows from a fairly dislikable - though sympathetic - character to one of my favorites. She's almost a subversion of the Ice Cold Blonde villain trope, at first coming off as closed-off and emotionless but eventually showing a far softer side.

I don’t think I have much more to say than that on the quality of this as a sequel. It was good enough and the ending was nice - I liked seeing all the threads come together. But I’m hoping book three goes back to being more character-drivne.

✨Arc received from the publisher via Netgalley for an honest review.
released: 7 May 2018.

This sequel to Amberlough picks up three years after book one, and so when we encounter several of the characters from the first book, it is to see that their lives are drastically transformed by the intervening years of Ospie rule in Gedda. If you'll recall, the first book chronicled the rise of a Nazi-like fascist movement in a fictional country with a 1930s flair and an urban culture deemed morally deviant by the rising regime. We watched as our beloved, messy, morally questionable characters' lives were dashed to smithereens, remember?

The action of Armistice mostly takes place outside of Gedda, broadening the political scope of the series. We're in Porachis, a tropical country that seems South Asian in its inspiration. It took me a while to realize that Porachis actually has a matriarchal social structure, which is both refreshing and important to at least one aspect of the story. The cabaret angle of the first book is replaced with a film industry angle in the second, but show-biz is still show-biz. Aristide has achieved a high-profile position in his new expatriate life as a film director for a studio run by a shrewd and powerful woman named Pulan. Cordelia arrives on the scene, having been smuggled out of the country by the rebel group she leads under the code name "Spotlight," and seeks work as a dancer on a film Ari is directing. The contrast between these two is sharp: while Cordelia has been fighting a hard, losing battle at home, Ari has nursed his pain by turning his back on Geddan politics and losing himself in the escapism and glamor of the films he most likes to make.

Cyril's place as the third major character is taken by his sister, Lillian DePaul, whose story as an unwilling political pawn of the Ospies mirrors Cyril's from book one is some interesting ways. She's the press attaché for the Geddan embassy in Porachis, in the ever-painful position of being a public spokesperson tasked with defending the unconscionable. It isn't the life she had in mind when she chose to dedicate herself to public service in better times. This isn't the government she thought she was signing up to work for, but now she's stuck. Her superiors have her son enrolled in an Ospie boarding school, and she is only allowed access to him if she does as she's told. And even if she could take her son and flee, what would she do? She's a woman who has sacrificed so much in her life for the sake of a career in government, it would mean throwing her entire life as she knows it away and starting again. Lillian may not be as charismatic a character as Cyril, but I actually came to sympathize with her dilemmas much more deeply.

Lillian also gets to have the central romantic conflict of this book. Amberlough centered around LGBTQ+ characters, and they are very much still represented here by Aristide and others, but Lillian's secret love affair with her child's Porachin father was illicit and forbidden for other reasons. As is true with all of the relationships in the series, nothing about Lillian's love life is easy or straightforward, especially with dangerous political games in the mix and, in this case, a child at stake.

Like the first book, Armistice is a complex page-turner, and I was mildly surprised to find that the plot turned out to be a sort of caper. And although it fits with the caper structure, I was also somewhat surprised at how many things that could have gone horribly wrong didn't. After all, if something could go catastrophically badly in Amberlough, it probably did. It feels like Lara Elena Donnelly is pulling some of those punches here, allowing her characters to make wiser choices and benefit from them. It may feel tamer and safer as a storytelling technique, but I'm ready to welcome what seems like a bridge to a more hopeful series finale.

Because I didn't do a full review of Amberlough, I want to take a moment to address what Donnelly seems to be doing with this series as a whole. First, it's noteworthy that this is a non-magical secondary world, and one based on an unconventional time period for fantasy. I've read books set in medieval-ish fairy tale type kingdoms that don't have magic, and no one bats an eye at calling them fantasy, so I stand by "fantasy" as the correct genre term for this series. And regardless, it's clearly exceptional speculative worldbuilding. After all, I'm always more interested in the social structures and conflict in any fictional world than in the magic system, so on some level it puzzles me that there aren't a ton more authors doing what Donnelly is doing.

Second, I want to point out that the focus of the series is on characters who are several steps removed from the height of power and decision-making, even if they are close enough to government workings to be in a lot of danger and give us an inside look at the political machinery. Like, in this book we have diplomats, rebels, and well-connected entertainment industry folks, not towering villains or opportunely-placed chosen ones. I found it fascinating in the first book to see how political disaster gradually spilled out to those who assumed they would be safe, and in this book we're looking at the different ways that characters are coping with an entrenched crisis, literally from afar.

The downside is actually the greatest weakness of these books for me... it's dang hard to follow some of the major political events in this series when they are so complicated, and we're viewing them from a remove. For example, the armistice of this book's title is a reference to recent events in a border dispute between Gedda and another neighboring country. It's all very important, but hard to retain the critical details when none of the characters are directly involved. This is a case where extra materials, like glossaries of political figures or timelines of recent events might actually be a lot of help.

Lastly, I continue to think this series would make for EXCELLENT television. I want it to happen.

I was surprised about how much this book is about lose. Everyone is mourning their previous lives and their country that the fascists have taken over. Cordelia is mourning her fellow revolutionists because she's not sure if they are still alive. Lillian is mourning her control over her life. Aristide is mourning his life and Cyril. Cyril's absence is felt by so many people to the point where he has to come back next book.

My biggest problem with the book is that the political aspect confuses me. Every time another country is mentioned, I get lost.

Met new characters and caught up with some older ones. Again, there are intrigues everywhere. Like her brother, Lillian DePaul is blackmailed into working for the OSPies. Novel had a satisfying conclusion as opposed to the first book's cliffhangers. I look forward to reading the next book.

If you start Armistice simply expecting it to be more of Amberlough, you will be disappointed. Which isn’t to say that the second part of the series is in any way worse than the first - just that there’s a very different feeling about it.

We move three years into the future & into Porachis, the neighbouring country. That dazzling city of cabarets & decadence we came to know? It’s no longer there, since the Ospies turned the world upside-down. And so Armistice deals with the fall-out of that disastrous event - it’s more about how the characters try to make sense of their new lives and hold out hope of getting the old lives back than anything else. There are still spying missions and politics, of course, just as in the first book, but it all has a very different, more desperate vibe. They’re no longer fighting against a system but instead attempt to rebuild a lost country. It’s especially interesting to see since we get to fitness this struggle from an outsider's perspective, as all of the main characters are now outsiders of their homeland.

Speaking of characters, I’m sure I wasn't the only one who picked up this book waiting anxiously for news of Cyril. Not only do we not learn anything about him - it’s never even clear if he’s alive - but both Aristide and Cordelia are so much changed by the Ospies induced nightmares, they almost feel like different people. Their traumas and emotional trials are palpable, Aristide missing his lover Cyril & being unable to fully pursue another relationship because of this actually seems like the core of the novel at times. And this is still very much a characters driven novel. That’s truly where Donnelly’s strength lies in, creating those multi-dimensional characters who sometimes feel more real than actual living people you know.

So that’s one (amazing) aspect in which Donnelly is giving the readers exactly what they came to expect after Amberlough. Another would be the style itself. Now, if you enjoyed the writing in the first book, you will like this as well. It’s just as dense, just as full of a made-up slang, making you pause every three minutes to make sure you got a sentence right. I can see how people would love this but unfortunately, for me personally it was kind of hard to get through. It doesn’t help that basically the first half of the book is pretty slow with action, either. On the more technical side of things, I especially didn’t like the use of a different type of quotation to note a character speaking another language.

Overall, Armistice is a solid continuation of the series. It introduces a bunch of new characters, adds a lot of depth and flavor into this miraculous world, and answers some of the questions we’re left with at the end of Amberlough. And even though it very clearly feels like The Middle Book - you know the syndrome - it doesn’t actually disappoint.

[this review will be up on my blog acquadimore.wordpress.com on 05/29]

Armistice is the second book in the spy thriller series The Amberlough Dossier.

Lara Elena Donnelly excels at endings.
Endings are rarely my favorite part of the story, but the first thing Amberlough and its very different sequel Armistice have in common is that I always ended up emotionally compromised.
I wasn’t even loving this book until the last 20%. I really liked it, I love all the characters, but I have to say that the pacing around the middle of the book wasn’t the best, it almost dragged. And then the ending happened, and here I am. It didn’t even need to be as cruel as Amberlough, it was intense anyway.

Armistice is mostly set in Porachis, the tropical country in which Lilian works as a diplomat for the now-fascist Gedda and Aristide is now a film director, and where Cordelia is trying to find allies. As a setting, it was never as developed as the city of Amberlough, but I can say that I loved its atmosphere. Its climate meant that everyone was scheming against fascists in pretty clothes and great weather, and considering that the aesthetic is half the reason I’m reading this series, I really appreciated it.

The other main reason are the characters. I love all of the main ones, even the ones who are terrible. Many of them went through a lot during the first book, and in the second book they have to recover. Their development was really interesting, especially considering what they learned: things usually work better when people don’t hide everything from each other. People solving things with communication! And there’s still scheming! It’s great and I love them all. Especially Cordelia (she changed so much and she’s amazing), but all of them, the new ones as well. It took me a while to get attached to Lillian, but once I did I cared a lot, and I also loved Daoud and Pulan, two characters whose main purpose is, basically, to annoy Aristide (Aristide is petty. Not recommended, but some of those scenes in the second half were hilarious.)
And one last thing I love about all of this – it has many sad moments, many heavy moments, but it never feels like a tragedy. It’s always so alive, and also funny at times.

Now everything seems headed towards a war and I have to wait at least a year for the sequel. At least this ending wasn’t as evil as the first.

Lara Elena Donnelly's debut Amberlough was a dazzling story of decadence, sex, and the embrace of art in the face of authoritarianism. But readers who dive into Armistice expecting more of the same thing--strippers, cabaret dancers, forbidden passions--may end up being a little disappointed. This sequel is wholly focused on characters--some old, some new--as they try to deal with the fallout of the ending of the first book. So we don't get the "let's-rip-our-clothes-off" brand of sexiness, but what we do (eventually) get is some open communication between the characters. Which, frankly, is even sexier--both in real-life and in fiction.

In Armistice, the setting has been moved from Gedda to Porachis, a warm tropical country reminiscent of India. Three years have passed since the fascist Ospie Party have taken control of Amberlough and the rest of Gedda. Cordelia, once a performer at the Bumble Bee Cabaret, has now become the leader of the infamous resistance/anarchist group known as the "Catwalk." Aristide, once an emcee and secret smuggler, has turned refugee and film director at a studio in Porachis. Lillian is the last of our protagonists and unlike the other two, we've only known her by name in the first book. She's the sister of Cyril DePaul (Aristide's lover) and she's been taken under the thumb of the Ospies as a diplomat. Circumstances draw these people to one another and their past and present agendas tangle together into an unruly mess.

We're immediately introduced a slew of new and old characters, and there are many connections (social, political, personal) that you have to keep track of, which can get a little overwhelming. It doesn't help that it's been over a year since I've read Amberlough; it took me a while to remember who some of the side characters were.

As with the first book, the main characters are fantastically well-written. I came into the story feeling ambivalent about Lillian, but Donnelly has written her with so much care that it's hard not to be intrigued by her. Yes, she's working for the enemy. But she's also a mother whose son has effectively been hostage to elicit good behaviour from her. Like Cyril, her loyalties are being pulled at both ends, and you can't help but feel for her.
Cordelia and Aristide are not the same people that they were three years ago. With Aristide, it felt like I was getting to know him for the first time. He's shed his stage persona and has become more serious and gruff. And we see depths to him--grief, anger, love--that we never really got a chance to see in Amberlough, and I loved every bit of it. I did, however, find myself missing the Cordelia and Aristide of the old. And this isn't a criticism of the book, but a praise, because we're meant to miss them. Lament the fact that a fascist government has smothered so much of their vitality.

I did feel that the first half of the story was a little slow--much of it is spent getting all the characters together in the same place. And we also never really get a good sense of what Porachis as a country looks like. As with the characters, I found myself pining for the vibrant atmosphere of the Bumble Bee (really, fascists ruin everything).

All in all, this is a different but great sequel to one of last year's best debuts. Whereas in Amberlough things spiraled down to ruin and disaster, in Armistice, things steadily climb towards hope. It sets up the necessary groundworks for a potentially pulse-pounding, ulcer-inducing third book, and I can't wait.


Thank you to Netgalley and Tor for providing a review copy.

Few speculative fiction novels were as popular and praised last year in my reading circles as Amberlough, Donnelly’s debut. Tempted, I requested the sequel from NetGalley, and upon realising that these are clearly not stand-alone volumes, got ahold of the first part. My impressions were mixed, but I was still curious enough to pick up the sequel, and I’m glad to report that if you liked Amberlough, you’ll probably enjoy Armistice a whole lot, too.

For me, this is still a novel that is as successful on some levels as it falls short on others. So what’s good? The characters, certainly. The protagonists are complex, interesting and compelling, and their development is done and described superbly. Cordelia, whose arc was charted so well in Amberlough, becomes even more complex and interesting here, making difficult choices and undergoing character growth. I wish she had been given a little more to do, particularly early on in the novel, but I am enthusiastic about a well-written woman revolutionary. Aristide’s narrative arc is a little less crowd-pleasing, I suppose, since especially at the beginning, we witness the character at a low point, selling out, so to speak, living in profound denial and self-medicating his sorrows with alcohol, but that too is rendered well. And then there’s Lillian, the diplomat, the sister of Cyril, coming to the end of her tether and facing the choice of trying to escape or remaining within the confines of her captivity.

Each of the characters is forced to weigh the greater good and personal happiness, risks and rewards, and often, to examine their own complicity. In addition, they are also given the chance to realise a lot about themselves and their choices – and the novel excels in paragraphs of insight, often beautifully written, in turns witty, clever and poignant.

Unfortunately, once again, I feel like the plot and worldbuilding don’t quite measure up to the level of talent visible in creation of characters (including the secondary cast of new characters) and the language/style itself. I didn’t find the new location to be given the same level of atmosphere as Amberlough in the first volume; I didn’t quite get the feel of its culture or people, and the dialogues rendered in different styles of quote marks depending on their language, and the appearance of translators, and made-up idioms didn’t quite suffice for me as a shorthand for the alienation experienced by the characters. There were certainly moments when the new locale became more vivid, but it was not on the same level as Amberlough and Gedda, and the culture of Porachi felt a little underexplored at times (particularly its royal family, whose relevance and relationship to characters I couldn’t quite pinpoint, but also the film world, which was sketched and then abandoned, unlike the believable and realistic cabaret of the first volume).

And then there’s the plot. The pacing is rather slow and the plot twists fairly repetitive for the first two-thirds of the book, especially for a novel described as “tumultuous mixture of sex, politics, and spies“. The spies, once again, seem to have a fairly small repertoir of weapons and tactics at their disposal, and for much of the book, are not allowed to accomplish anything much. I’m inclined to think this might not be a bug but rather a feature – it’s the second novel in a row in which it feels like the characters are truly up against a force they don’t quite know how to handle, not even in the short term, and it makes sense – but I feel like especially Cordelia could have had a little more agency in the early chapters, and Lillian might have been allowed to show off her skills (even in the service of evil) a little. That said, once the novel gets going in the second half, the plot improves, and I found it to be the most bracing sequence of events yet, with a few chapters that had me sitting on the edge of my seat and truly uncertain as to the direction the action was about to take.

That said, this is visibly a middle novel, and what it does very well is set the stage for a true conflagration and explosion in volume three. I can’t wait to read that part.

Armistice is not the easiest book to delve into if you haven’t read its predecessor Amberlough.  It is a complex, politically driven novel with hard bitten characters focused on their own agendas.  There are no clear “good” guys. All sides were grey. I expected more action. Instead, there was a lot of double dealing discussed and a lot of whining.  


I had a hard time identifying with any of the characters.  Cordelia was an unlikely rebel leader, with a patois that was unbelievable.  Aristide spent his entire time getting drunk, whining, and causing problems. Lillian was the easiest to empathize with.  Her devotion to regaining her son is understandable.


I normally like political/espionage novels but Armistice wasn’t my cup of tea.  There wasn’t much of the Art Deco flavor that was touted in the description, and the action was only at the very end.


3 / 5


I received a copy of Armistice from the publisher and Netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review.


Crittermom

The Powerful Followup to the Gut-Punching Amberlough

Spoiler-ific review

I was given this book for free for the purpose of review.

The publication date is May 15th 2018.

Book 2 of the Amberlough Dossier, ARMISTICE is the glamorous followup to the neon-lit and gritty book AMBERLOUGH. Where book 1 focused on the fascist take-over of the city-state of Amberlough, book 2 takes place in an entirely different nation with a thriving (and gloriously seedy) film industry. The art-deco infused setting has upped the glamour from the first book and added a distinct political tinge.

Several of the main characters from the first book return.

Cordelia, codename: Nellie, has become the terrorist leader of the Spotlight, a rag-tag group of unemployed entertainment industry professionals who lost their jobs when the ultra-conservative Ospies took over Amberlough.

Aristede, once a drug smuggling burlesque theater owner and drag actor. He had to run for his life from Amberlough because of his deviant behavior. He fled to the film-district in a foreign nation, where he now lives a glamorous life as a tragic writer/director-in-exile from his homeland.

Lilian dePaul is the sister of Cyril dePaul, a character from the first book. She's reluctantly working for the Ospies because they have kidnapped her son and are using him to blackmail her.

Plot: If the first book was a criminal-underworld book, this is a spy-thriller. I liked it. The plot revolved around a brewing civil war in a distant nation, with the Ospies are propping up one side while the royalists prop up the other. The different sides are busy backstabbing one another to get their way. It was very intrigue heavy and delightful.

Characterization: Cordelia is trying to support the Spotlight in their attempt to destabilize and destroy the conservative government. Aristede is trying to walk the line between staying 'clean,' out of the Spotlight's rebellion, while not alienating his host nation and losing his luxurious lifestyle. Lilian, meanwhile, reluctantly must oppose the other two main POV characters while her Ospie bosses forces her demean herself with 'extracurricular activities.'

I liked all the characters, but particularly liked Lilian- which was surprising, given that -she was a new character. I have a fondness for straight-edged characters forced to demean themselves.

Pacing: It had a fairly slow start. I liked the slow burn, but I would understand if someone else didn't like it.

Constructive Criticism: Head hopping. The story's narrative dipped into the thoughts of all the different POV characters when they were on scene together, the textbook definition of Head Hopping. It wasn't as bad as it could have been, but it was distracting.

Overall, I liked it almost as much as the first book- and the first book was in my top 5 books of the year. Highly recommended, but read book 1 first.

Stay Sunny!

I received an advanced copy of this from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review! And trust me, all these words are coming straight from the heart. This is like, some of the best fiction happening in speculative and LGBT+ fiction right now. Amberlough was one of the best reads in fantasy of 2017, and this is just as damn good.

This follows on a few years after Amberlough, but set in a neighbouring country, Porachis. We're reintroduced to Cordelia and Aristide, changed from the years of oppression by the Ospies - Cordelia now a revolutionary leader, Aristide a high-profile refugee/film director. We're also joined by Lillian DePaul, Cyril's sister and press attache for the Geddan embassy in Porachis - very much a part of the OSP regime as she is being crushed by it. The plot that ensues is the three of these players drawn to each other as scandals unfurl and secrets are unearthed, all in the way of undermining the regime

This plot is beyond excellent. Where Amberlough was the excruciating descent into oppression and conflict, this is deep in scheming and subterfuge, our protagonists desperately trying to dig out what has become entrenched, all while constantly wondering who to trust, and how much. The pacing is so tight, the novel is constantly exciting and compelling. It's not as fraught and explosive as Amberlough, it's the second-book-in-a-trilogy in that way, but it's just as tense and achingly emotional - maybe even more so. Much of the emotional crux of the novel still rides on the relationship between Aristide and Cyril, and it was so damn satisfying to see a queer relationship that important to the narrative. Donnelly is able to give just as much time and importance to the world and the characters, who are still so heartbreakingly wonderful.

The worldbuilding is still fantastic - Porachis read to me as an Indo-Arab influenced country, and it absolutely came to life for me. I used to live in an Arab country with a very high South Asian population, so I could vividly recall my own memories just from the descriptions of the streets, the weather, the food and the restaurants. It was such a vibrant, refreshing location for a thriller/spec-fic/historical novel like this one, and I loved it. It had its own distinct societal norms and mores that influenced characters' actions and thoughts, its own political system, its own cultural, including a thriving film industry that was so old Hollywood and Bollywood in one - such a great mirror to hold against the now-changed Gedda of the first book.

And oh, the characters are just still the absolute highlight, which is a pretty amazing thing to say in a book where everything is done so well. I loved the addition of Lillian, another fantastic female protagonist, just as flawed and thorny as the rest but still so complex and sympathetic - because like so many others in the cast, the ferocity in her to protect what she loves just lights her character up like a spotlight (;) hehe). You could see how she and Cyril were raised the same, the similarities between them as siblings, but how their lives took them completely different directions. The new cast in Porachis were great, too - Pulan, Daoud, Prince Asiyah, and oh Jinadh, whom I loved so very very much. You know it's a good book when I find the het relationship sexy as hell, and Lillian and Jinadh's chemistry was amazing.

Memmediv is back, and his character is explored further from the shadowy figure we saw through Cyril's perspective, and Sofie Keeler and her family is back in the mix, too, always great to see. The rest of our returning cast? So, so superb. The way Cordelia and Ari had grown since the last books was so interesting to read - seemingly in entirely opposite directions, with Cordelia becoming key to the Geddan resistance and Ari trying as hard as he can to ignore the situation in Gedda entirely. I still love that these people in particular have been chosen as the series' protagonists, the ones who drive the action - the 'freaks' and misfits of society. They were just as fantastic to read about as in the first book, both so much damn fun but their stories so damn heartaching, I love them so much.

And what I loved most was being able to see what all our protagonists, including Cyril of the last book, look through each others' eyes. Cordelia's descriptions of Ari still kill me, I love their friendship, and the bond between Ari and Lillian from the start of the novel continued to be such a great, raw, aching emotional point, so amazing to read. Donnelly didn't skimp anywhere on drawing out the most painful emotional conflicts and moments, which is exactly what I love to read in my fiction about anything else. This novel very much focused on grief and loss, and anger and injustice, and how this can drive people to act, to just keep going even when you're so tired. It's something that we can really take to heart in this political climate, so canny.

I'm so, so, so damn excited to see how the rest of the series plays out, and what Donnelly will publish in the future, because she is so talented and writes everything I want how I want it, I feel spoiled just by reading one of her books.

I love Amberlough, and this sequel did not disappoint! I really loved Cordelia in book one, and love her even more in this one! So sad I didn’t get to read it in time for Library Reads!