Reviews

The Alcazar is the sequel to The Cerulean, a book I enjoyed a lot. It feels less like a separate book in a series and more like the second half of the Cerulean, and reading it changed my thoughts on some aspects of the Cerulean. Overall I still liked both books a lot, but there were a few things that were disappointing in this one, as well as ways that it improved on the first book.

The story picks up with the heroine, Sera, and her friends Agnes, Leo and Vada on their way to the island nation of Pelago, where the tether that connects the planet to Sera's homeland, the City Above the Sky, is located. To get to the tether and ultimately get Sera home, they will need to make their way through a nation on the brink of war. They have potential allies in Agnes and Leo's relatives, the Byrnes, a powerful Pelagan family, but the twins know very little about them, and their grandmother, Ambrosine, has a reputation that suggests she might not be an easy ally. Meanwhile, back in the City, Sera's friend Leela is determined to uncover the secrets that have been hidden from her people for the last nine hundred years, even if it means going up against the High Priestess, who rules all aspects of Cerulean life. But Leela has few allies, and when she is caught somewhere she isn't supposed to be, she finds herself having made a very dangerous enemy.

In terms of just the plot, I enjoyed this one at least as much, if not more, than the first one. In the first book, Sera spends most of her time imprisoned in a city while Agnes and Leo take on the bulk of the action around her, and while I liked that setting, I really love travel books, so having the planet side characters on the move and visiting the varied and interesting nation of Pelago was an improvement. The world building around this new country was really creative. And the story itself had just as much tension as the first book, especially once Ambrosine Byrne, a character no one really knew what to make of, was involved. Meanwhile in the City, Leela's storyline was tense and exciting, with a lot of mysteries to unravel. There were a couple of points when she got caught doing something that literally made me jump.

The characters and relationships also continued to be strong, with a couple of exceptions. I was a little disappointed with the characters of Sera and Leo, who I enjoyed a lot in the first book. Sera seemed to go from an adventurous, restless and interesting character to a paragon, there just for everyone else to admire; outside of a few scenes at the end, I felt like her only characteristics were "powerful, cool looking and morally superior." And while I appreciate Leo turning from a selfish rich kid into a heroic character, that seemed to happen very abruptly between the books, with no real consequences for his previous actions and no sense that he still had old habits he had to learn to resist. (At one point, he realizes how cruel he always was to someone who was trying to be kind to him and then... does nothing at all about it even though the guy is sitting right in front of him.) But I still really loved Agnes and especially Leela. Both of them had great (but very different) arcs as they found strength and power they didn't know they had and figured out who they really were. As with the first book, it isn't that the characters are terribly original so much as that they are written very well. And I really appreciate how strong the friendships in these books were. The romantic relationships were fine but the friendships were incredible.

Unfortunately, after a lot of build-up, the mysteries set up in these books fell flat. There were some answers that I was able to guess, and some that had that "I didn't guess it but now that it's explained it feels obvious" feeling... but there were also a lot of places where I didn't feel like the storyline really held together, the worldbuilding was messy, the magic was vaguely explained (I don't mind a soft magic system, at all, but it needs to be consistently soft, not just when something needs to be hand waved) and there was a ton of plot convenience, especially in the way the story got to its happy ending. However, I did really love the endings for all the characters. A bittersweet-but-still-happy ending can make up for a lot of failures on the way to getting there. I especially loved that there were a few plotlines and character arcs that didn't feel too wrapped up, giving the impression that the story will go on even with the books finished.

As far as the controversy around Sera's sexuality, now that I've finished the books, here's what I thought

I get what the author was going for with a reverse-homophobia (heterophobia?) plotline, and I didn't find it at all offensive, but it still didn't work for me. I think if she'd left it the way it felt in the first book, where Sera was confused and worried about her inability to feel attraction until she realized she was attracted to boys and then it was fine, that would have been okay. A little silly, but okay. But instead we get Wyllin delivering a whole speech about how there are straight Ceruleans and that's okay, the implication that Sera didn't know this because her culture had stopped valuing their own diversity, her emotional "coming out" moment with Leela... yeah, it was a bit much. It didn't work on the meta level of giving a queer storyline to a cishet character, and it really didn't work in-world because the implications weren't thought through. I didn't really mind it, mostly because of the four main characters, two were lesbians - Agnes, who had a romantic plotline, and Leela, for whom romance took a back seat to other aspects of her story - but I would have liked the story better without it.)

Content Warnings

mempereur's review

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adventurous mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

fletchergross's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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