I would summarize this duology as “an original and creative American Gods fanfic.” Lilith Saintcrow (who has an awesome name by the way) tells a good and engrossing story, with a setting and a conceit that (as I said in my review of book 1, Spring’s Arcana) could have been lifted straight out of Gaiman’s book.
This review will be about the duology as a whole, because book 1 (again, as I said in my earlier review) doesn’t really end, it just stops. It’s a single story split in two volumes.
The protagonist here is Nat, the rather downtrodden daughter of her Russian-immigrant mother, growing up not-quite-poor in Brooklyn. Nat’s mother is sick and dying, and has set Nat on a path to find a way to get her better. Along the way, Nat learns that her mother is in fact the embodiment of Spring. Characters she meets along the way include Baba Yaga (her grandmother); gods of thieves, cops, and cowboys; and Jay Gatsby.
We also learn that Nat’s mother (never a particularly loving figure) has plans for her daughter, mostly of the sacrificial variety.
The advantage of fanfic (and, for the record, I like fanfic) is that the best ones can tell a great story without having to put in the effort to create worlds and characters. I called this book “American Gods fanfic” because that’s what it feels like. I can’t really put my finger on how the world of this book is different from Gaiman’s, but I also don’t particularly care.
Where this book shines is as a recovery-from-abuse story. Nat struggles to realize just how abused she’s been; she struggles to accept just what her mother has in mind for her; she struggles with guilt over having the audacity to want to live.
So what does all this add up to? On the one hand, this was derivative and fairly uncreative; on the other hand, the story packs a punch.