A review by tasharobinson
The House of Diamond by Ursula Vernon

4.0

I read these out of order because I finally gave up on waiting for book 1 to come back into print, so I broke down and read book 2… and only then thought to re-check whether book 1 was finally available again. And it was. So I had a weird narrative experience, first reading how all these characters end their stories, then reading how they're first introduced and defined. That said, if I'd read them in order, I'm not sure it would have stood out to me how different book 1 is from book 2 — how much the first book is focused on filtering everything through the protagonist's viewpoint, while book 2 departs from it more, and how much bigger and wilder and scarier the world gets in book 2. I ended up liking them both pretty much equally, but for very different reasons — the first book for its efficiency in world building and character setup, the second more for its wild elaborations on the world, and its epic scale.