I was happy to review The Denounced: A Grey Sun and equally happy to review its sequel. Shifting Horizons picks up as Ned and the rest of his pod escape his secular world and come across nomads who have a belief in a higher being. Ned still struggles with his leadership - both enforcing it and wearing it - however he's determined to make it back home.

Ned's character is an intense one in a world that is confusing and dangerous; he's someone I can identify with in his analytical manner of observing people and their actions, however he's the focus of my attention as a reader while the plot is more secondary. Hopefully if there is a third, both plot and characters will come together for me - I look forward to reading more.

As I was reading Shifting Horizons I felt that it was a potentially good idea that had been let down by poor execution. Book two sees our dystopian Breakfast Club (the athlete, the brain, the princess et al.) are still chained to their character archetypes and unfortunately see no real growth. I also would have appreciated a more considered hand at editing, because the text is littered with errors and bad grammatical choices that are very distracting for me personally as a reader. Ned, the stoic tactician with 'gravitas' has a distractingly clunky inner dialogue, delivering such lines as 'Their hands will be tied, I'm sure of that, but I won't know until I know, so I decide there is nothing I can do but save my mental strength for the time that is surely coming soon' with complete solemnity. A lot of persistent new writer pitfalls can be avoided with another manuscript pass through.

As the plot began to reveal more about Ned's world I drew strong parallels to the premise of Hunger Games, but unfortunately despite allusions to Sympathisers, Powers-That-Be, Authorities, Systems and Other Gratuitously Capitalised Words I just couldn't see how this was improving on the genre. It seemed like a hodgepodge of vaguely mysterious entities and I still feel mostly confused about their motivations beyond the basic power grab. I am sure that others will be excited and even pleased to see the story moving forward but I felt that this sequel fell short.