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A review by brokenrecord
Forged in Blood II by Lindsay Buroker
4.0
4.5 stars. Basically as good as all the others!
In non-Sicarius/Amaranthe related things, Books's death was sad! I should've expected that it wasn't likely for the whole team to make it through in one piece, but it was still a gut punch. It's nice that they'll be using his work on the constitution and all that to remake the government, and I loved how excited Books was by the republic and democracy and all of that.
So yeah, I pretty much just love this series. There are two more books after this, but this is pretty much the "true" ending of the series, of all the major arcs (and was originally intended to be the end), and it was a pretty good wrap-up for everything. That being said, I am still glad that there is more beyond this since I was not ready to give up this world after finishing this book!
Spoiler
I knew going in that Sicarius and Amaranthe would be separated for awhile which made me wary because their dynamic is my favorite thing, so less of that is never going to be something I look forward to, and ending the previous book with them separated didn't help. But after the first few chapters, I got over it. I think a couple things helped: 1) we got both of their POVS (unlike the 3rd and 5th books, where they're separated for long times and we don't get Sicarius's POV), 2) starting the book with the separated helped because I at least had them reuniting to look forward to (when they're together for the first half, like in book 6, and THEN separated, I just get stressed out about whether they'll reunite before book's end), and 3) once Amaranthe meets up with Starcrest and then the wizard mentions he's going to have Sicarius kill Starcrest, you can start to see how they're going to converge, so then it's just exciting to wait for Amaranthe to figure out Sicarius is alive and wait for them to meet up again. I was worried Sicarius would be under the wizard's influence for like the entire book and the climax would be him getting back to himself, but thankfully that wasn't the case. So the separation worked better here for me than it did in other previous books.In non-Sicarius/Amaranthe related things, Books's death was sad! I should've expected that it wasn't likely for the whole team to make it through in one piece, but it was still a gut punch. It's nice that they'll be using his work on the constitution and all that to remake the government, and I loved how excited Books was by the republic and democracy and all of that.
So yeah, I pretty much just love this series. There are two more books after this, but this is pretty much the "true" ending of the series, of all the major arcs (and was originally intended to be the end), and it was a pretty good wrap-up for everything. That being said, I am still glad that there is more beyond this since I was not ready to give up this world after finishing this book!