I'm giving this five stars purely for the reading experience. Once I started, I needed to know what will happen next. The writing itself was not that amazing. It was rather skeleton. While the plot was eventful, it was not fully developed. There was a lot of "Like that, another two years passed..." and "thirty seven years went by...", but the was some politics and romance and strategy plot points and it kind of came together. What needed to happen was all there, just not written out in detail: the nuances and how it happened. But for me, it was fine.
This was definitely more exciting than the previous book. Slightly less romance focused in comparison.
I would say, the story is getting better.