Genre: Fantasy
Age Range: YA
Star Rating: 4 stars
Series: second book of duology
*SPOILER ALERT: contains SPOILERS for THIS VICIOUS GRACE*
Blurb:
When the gods make the rules, the players must choose: Sacrifice their love to save the world, or choose love and let it burn?
Six months after saving their island from destruction and almost losing Dante, Alessa is ready to live happily ever after with her former bodyguard. But Dante can’t rest, haunted by a conviction that the gods aren’t finished with them yet. And without his powers, the next kiss from Alessa could kill him.
Desperate for answers, Dante enlists Alessa and their friends to find the exiled ghiotte in hopes of restoring his powers and combining forces with them to create the only army powerful enough to save them all. But Alessa is hiding a deadly consequence of their last fight–a growing darkness that’s consuming her mind–and their destination holds more dangers than anyone bargained for. In the mysterious city of the banished, Dante will uncover secrets, lies, and ghosts from his past that force him to ask himself: Which side is he on?
When the gods reveal their final test, Dante and Alessa will be the world’s last defence. But if they are the keys to saving the world, will their love be the price of victory?
Blurb taken from Goodreads. Add to your shelves here.
Review:
THIS VICIOUS GRACE is a nice sequel that takes the mythology of the previous book and brings it to life for an epic final battle.
The cast travel to a new land to find if creatures of myth are really living there – and then try to team up with the people they’ve been persecuting in order to save the world. There’s plenty of tensions between the sides, understandably, as trust comes slowly between them. (I would have liked a map of the wider world, which the previous book had for the island.)
Both Alessa and Dante narrate in this book, and while they have about equal chapters, I’d say this is really Dante’s book. Alessa just needs to save the world (again) but he’s torn between two people groups, the two parts of himself, and trying to find a way to reconcile the past and heritage with the friends he’s made and the person he is today. He is the emotional heart of this book.
I often find myself a bit frustrated with relationship drama in the second book of a series because it can feel quite manufactured at times. Too often, to me, it feels like things happening purely so the happily-ever-after/happily-for-now the previous book ended on is disrupted so there’s a new round of tension here.
However, in this book, it felt more or less realistic, like the natural outpouring of the various traumas they’d experienced over the past book (and before.) There were a few occasions where I wanted to shake them and demand they just talked because keeping secrets was only going to make matters worse in the long run (though by-and-large these two behaved like sensible adults and talked it out when the truth came to light, which was nice.)
Read my reviews of other books by Emily Thiede:
The Last Finestra (this series):
- THIS VICIOUS GRACE (#1)
Sifa Elizabeth Reads 