17th finished book of the year: The Kingdom of Flesh and Fire by Jennifer L. Armentrout
(I’m actually 25 books in at this point, just reading a fair bit faster than I’m posting currently, haha)
4.75⭐️ - Just as engaging and entertaining as the first, with enough twists and turns to keep things interesting too.
If there’s an overarching theme to the Blood and Ash books so far, it’s this: “Think our heroine is special? Well you don’t know the half of it!”. It’s almost funny at times how flabbergasted the characters are as they discover that while they initially assumed one thing about her, they’ve now realised they were only partially right.
As the party of characters expands and we see more of the world through Poppy’s eyes, we get to experience her adjusting to the fact that all she ever knew was a lie. In this way, the world building is introduced naturally as she is learning it for herself, which was something I really enjoyed.
If the first book had a pinch of spice, this one has a spoonful. To say that the main characters are constantly horny for each other feels like an understatement and at times it feels like an almost gratuitous number of pages devoted to describing this. There’s also a considerable lack of boundaries shown, with a level of ‘I don’t care who is listening’ that would make me cringe in real life.
That said, I can’t claim this probably isn’t an accurate representation of a young new couple, albeit one in this instance where one party is over two hundred years old. It’s easy to forget that there’s an age difference though, given how they interact - maybe it’s just a given that be them fae, vampire, or Atlantian, long-lived fantasy males never grow up.
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