Blade of Dream

An massive improvement to me over Age of Ash, which I think was very well written but I really didn't like the character we were following. This book takes place across the same time period, but due to my disinterest in AoA and the time it's been since I've tried it, I didn't catch a single reference to the first book. So it works perfectly well on its own.

Abraham is excellent at making realistic characters and having all their decisions make sense. He is great with dialogue. My failure to connect here is mostly with the plot, which I didn't think gripped me at all until the last third. I will definitely read the third one and will probably do a full series reread before tackling it when it comes out.

Maybe 3.5. Very little plot. Mostly a lot of slice of life and character development.

I very much like the 2 main characters, but it had been a while since I read the first book and I didn't really remember what the overall plot was. It didn't matter too much since this didn't really seem to deal with that until the final section of the book.

There is very little to make this book a fantasy. It's there, and is probably an underlying driving force, but if you're expecting magical combat or something, you're going to be severely disappointed.

So far this is my least favorite of his fantasy series (I really loved Dagger & Coin), but I still liked it enough to pick up the final book.