Andi’s Reviews > The Cage of Dark Hours > Status Update

I want to like this climax, but I'm stuck on how limpwristed it feels. All the magical secrets get exposited to us, but this info is mostly used for fight scene reasons in the end. No leaning into the fact that the Thalo are humans and not fantastical creatures, and what that means for the characters and their culture. I liked when Krona resisted Hintosep earlier but now she just goes along with the magical plot.

Same deal as book 1 - very rough and uncomfortable writing in the first third, and now the writing is great and much more confident in the second third. Although it’s probably not great to have your first thrill happen at the 50% mark of your thriller. Still, I’m loving Mandip and the threads are starting to come together. Krona is not interesting in her own POV however. I like Thibault with Mandip more, lol

Stoppp overexplaining! The first 1 or maybe 2 sentences is always enough. “[Acel] hardly looked directly at Krona these days. Acel had already lost her husband and eldest child, and she often behaved as though Krona was already gone too.” Excellent! But THEN: “Krona didn’t blame her. She thought she understood. It was a way for Acel to protect herself—“ And it keeps going! Stop ruining it I already get it

These books feel slow because of repeated info. “He’d always preferred his conquests to be older than himself, somehow. More experienced, more worldly. It wasn’t difficult to impress someone on the verge of adulthood. There was no challenge there - no real prize to be won. At near twenty, he was plenty ready for bigger fish, as it were.” Repeated basically the same thing like 5 times in a row there.

I find this sequel a little funny, I can't tell if Lostetter planned this from the start, or if she realized she truly didn't explain basics of this world in book 1. I understand this society 10x better on page 22 than I did in all 500 pages of book 1. But now Krona feels guilty for being a PO who breaks the law off-duty when she had no qualms in book 1 and didn't experience anything that would've changed her mind