Yikes.

“Phoenix Flame” picks up a few short weeks after the events of book 1 and we find Maddie and her uncle Marcus trying trying to pick up the pieces left after the devotion at the hands of the Solver Prince is revealed. With the injustices of the soul trade looming over their heads Maddie works to find the mysterious piece to allow travel through worlds and stumbles upon someone from her past.

This probably should have been a standalone novel as the book begins with a fairytale like story that suddenly has so much meaning it serves as the driving force for a rather weak plot that left me feeling underwhelmed and unsatisfied.

The strength of book one was the building of the dynamics between the different realms and the mystery which allowed us to take all of this information in organically but this book never managed to achieve this rather it spent time tearing down a character and relationship that was already weak in order to deliver on a shared look between someone else and I just don’t understand the point of this novel at all.

If it had spent more time on building the characters more I think it could have had a different impact. The antagonists here are nonexistent and not in the puppet master sense where you may not see them on the page but you can feel them steering the hero/heroine headfirst into different obstacles and that’s where this book suffered the most. There were multiple instances of betrayal by different characters and not once did I care because the book didn’t even bother to give one of those moments/characters a second of dialogue which felt like a waste. I feel like there were a lot of regressions with some of the characters as well in order to move them from point a to point b without much care for their individual and shared arcs which is a shame as it comes off rather lazy.

It’s hard not to go into more detail especially since I want to give specific examples as to why this is such a flop but in an attempt to not share spoilers I’ll say while reading I saw the bolded “acknowledgements” section and immediately thought it was a formatting error on my e-galley because it just ended and the best example I can give is the Sopranos finale where you’re left staring at a blank screen asking “wait that’s it?”.

**special thanks to the publishers and netgalley for providing an arc in exchange for a fair and honest review**