Author: Susan Kaye Quinn
Publisher: Susan Kaye Quinn
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!
This is the sequel to Third Daughter which I reviewed positively today. I have to say I was a bit surprised, since I'd had the impression (wrongly, it seems!) that each of the three novels in the trilogy would be told from the perspective of the particular daughter to which the title referred, but it does not seem to be that way since this novel opens not with Seledri, the second daughter to the queen, and her adventures, but with Aniri (the third daughter) focused on her imminent wedding to Prince Malik. Indeed, the second daughter plays very little part in the story although she's the trigger for some major events.
This novel takes off from pretty much where the previous one ended, and is told from Aniri's PoV (again, not first person thankfully!). At the end of the previous novel it looked like there was a second sky ship out there which could still threaten Dharia, Aniri's homeland. In addition to that, Seledri has long been married to a Samiran lord, and living in that nation. If the two countries go to war, then her life - or at least her welfare - may be at risk.
With regard to the proposed wedding, I have a hard time believing that in Victorian times, there was a 'wedding rehearsal dinner'. Yes, they had a wedding rehearsal if they were wealthy enough, but this was a very private thing, quite literally to rehearse the wedding itself. The author here has created her own world, and she can do whatever she wants, but this rehearsal with a huge number of people in attendance struck a really false note for me. Of course, if she had not written this, then it would have been impossible to interrupt it with the dramatic news of an attempt on the life of Aniri's sister, the second sister of the title, Seledri.
This is where the novel (and the series) took a downturn for me. I was already soured with all the frivolous pomp of the 'wedding rehearsal', but to have Aniri take a big step backwards in her development, and to be dithering and fretting and panicking, and then to decide to postpone the wedding (scheduled for the very next day), and thereby failing to cement the alliance with Jungali, for no reason other than to hie herself to Samir to find out what happened to her sister was just plain stupid! It was foolish in the extreme and not at all in line with what we had learned to expect from Aniri in the previous volume, so for me it was a really poor start to this novel.
Aniri was taken prisoner and her life threatened by the Samir ambassador, and now she's going to voluntarily put herself at the mercy of these people, traveling pretty much alone into the heart of the enemy territory and give them a second hostage? This behavior is moronic. Clearly it was only done to elevate the drama between herself and Malik, but it was done badly, falsely, and amateurishly, and this wasn’t to be the first time. Things seemed to go determinedly downhill with one farcical daytime TV melodrama after another cropping up.
About half-way through this I was getting ready to ditch it and down-rate it, but it turned itself around somewhat - at least sufficiently fro me not to be able to rate it badly! I have to say I was disappointed in it. Aniri was nowhere near as good as she was in the first one, and the novel quite literally went around in circles ending-up at pretty much the same point as it began. It definitely had MTV (Mid-Trilogy Vexation) syndrome.
That said, there were sufficient good parts, particularly when Aniri gets her head out of her gaand and starts trying to make good on her deficits, that I felt I could uprate it in the hope that the third volume would be truly a worthy read like the first volume was.
