A great sequel. I really enjoyed this follow up and felt it was really well done. This world is imaginative and unlike anything I had read before. Highly recommend if you enjoy fantasy with a unique setting.

I adored Joshua Phillip Johnson’s The Forever Sea, set in a world where ships kept afloat by magical hearthfires sail an endless sea of grass, so much that I eagerly snatched up the sequel. And ended up wishing it had been a stand-alone.

This overly long book followed two storylines that are so disconnected for the first three-quarters of the book, I wished it had been divided into two separate volumes or, better yet, that the “continuing” story be cut. By far my favorite part involves a mainland noble family, Borders, that has fallen on hard times, both financially and politically. The power struggles of the ruthless Emperor and the vassal barons are convoluted, rich in cultural world-building, and full of drama. I found the loving, boisterous relationship between youngest Borders child, Flitch, and his siblings delightful and emotionally moving. The action gets even more gripping when, under immediate risk of their barony being destroyed by the Emperor, Flitch’s father reveals a secret hidden deep beneath their castle: the entrance to a realm of immensely powerful and deadly, nonhuman magic. Everything about the “Flitch” narrative grabbed me, from the tense action to the sweet love story between one of Flitch’s siblings, a gifted gender-neutral artist and a charismatic librarian from another barony, to their sister’s impulsive nature and the quiet, detail orientation of another brother. Eventually, the family seeks refuge with a neighbor baron, a youthful-seeming woman of extraordinary strength and madcap humor. She may well give Flitch a run as the most enchanting character in the book.

Meanwhile, Kindred, the heroine from the first volume, follows up setting the grass sea on fire with scuttling her ship, thereby sending her crew—all two of them, one of whom is her lover--to the eerie bottom of the sea. Here, the landscape is filled with fantastical plants and perhaps-animals, not to mention roving bands of humans eking out their livelihood from detritus falling from the surface. Alas, until well past the halfway point, there was so little dramatic tension in these chapters, I kept falling asleep.

At last, most of the way through the book, the two story lines veer toward one another when Kindred’s long-lost grandmother unleashes an army of deep-sea monsters that threaten human life on the surface. Alas, at this point I had lost all interest in the Kindred story, I skimmed over those parts to get back to the dramatic adventures of Flitch and his family. For me, past midway is far too late to introduce a reason to care about these characters and way, way too late for a hint that the two stories will at some nebulous point in the future come together (and they don’t, except in a deus ex machina sort of way). I kept reading on the strength of the first volume, but I don’t see how a reader new to this series would make any sense of it. Which is too bad because The Forever Sea is a really, really cool world. And Flitch's story is magnificent. (The five-star rating applies only to Flitch's story.)