For anyone sneaking a peak at this review who hasn’t read Malice, the TL;DR is that it is very good, and you don’t need to worry about starting a duology that doesn’t end well. Now go away, for I really don’t have a way to talk about this book without spoiling Malice.
Excepting a brief prologue, this book picks up the story a century after the events of Malice. Alyce has set up a court in the former kingdom of Briar, and the assorted magical creatures not welcome in the Faerie realm of Etheria (imps, goblins, demons, and the like) have flocked to her. They’ve been fighting a war against Etheria all this time (and winning). Aurora has been kept safe, her existence hidden from the court while Alyce continues to search for a way to bring her out of her enchanted sleep. To be more precise: the curse was softened at the end of Malice so that literally anyone except Alyce could kiss Aurora awake, but Alyce’s memories had been twisted so she would hate Alyce. That, specifically, is what Alyce wanted to avoid.
I don’t feel that it’s a spoiler to tell you that Aurora does in fact get woken up during this book, and she is less than thrilled by everything that happened since she fell into her cursed sleep. For her part, Alyce has changed over the previous century, and has become more devoted to the ideal of Aurora than Aurora herself in that time. None of this is surprising.
Naturally the book is mostly focused on the relationship between the two of them. It’s not a question of two lovers trying to make it work against impossible odds; it’s a question of two lovers trying to decide if they want to make it work, and if they can even talk to one another. Every interaction between the two of them is fraught. It’s not the easiest book to read.
Like with Malice, the book starts out kind of slow, but the pacing gets to be breakneck by the end as everything (Alyce & Aurora, Alyce’s internal struggles, the war) comes together. I give Heather Walter lots of credit for planting careful seeds along the way; I didn’t anticipate how things were going to play out, but once they did it all fit together perfectly. The ending (which I’m not implying is happy or sad, either one - read and find out for yourself) is beautiful. I cannot imagine anything more fitting.
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