Conqueror's Blood

This is the second book of the series, and picks up in a completely different corner of the world from Kevah and Micah's story. This time we follow Zedra and Cyra, two women connected to the throne of Alanya, as a power struggle between an ancient sorceress and an upstart sultana threatens to tear the kingdom apart. I was expecting to open the book and at least see Kevah as one of the main POV characters again. Instead, what greeted me was a completely different set of POV characters and a different location for the story entirely. The location shift wasn't a problem for me at all, actually, I encourage it, and I liked seeing the world expand beyond just the one city and conflict we got in book one.

In my review of the previous book, I talked about a mistake I felt the author made in the worldbuilding, how he basically combined a bunch of different Islamic and Middle Eastern cultures into one blended culture, rather than treating each one separately to make the world feel more diverse. This book kind of defeats that criticism entirely. The culture here feels genuinely distinct from the first book's setting, yet still clearly connected to the same larger world. So good job to the author on that front, that's a real, noticeable improvement in my opinion, and exactly the kind of cultural specificity I was hoping to see more of.

I also forgot to mention this in my review of the first book, but I really enjoy the main theme running through this series as a whole, the idea that religion plays such a massive, inescapable role in how society functions, and that the humans in this world are ultimately little more than playthings for the gods pulling the strings behind the scenes. That theme as a central pillar of the series is genuinely great and intriguing, it gives every political maneuver and personal decision an extra layer of weight, since you're always aware that these characters are operating within a much larger, colder cosmic game they don't fully understand or control. It's the kind of theme that elevates the story beyond just political intrigue or battles, and it's honestly one of the things that keeps me invested in this series even when other elements don't fully land for me.

On the content side, this one is gory rather than sexual, so if book one's sexual assault scene was a bigger concern for you than the violence, this entry leans more toward the brutal, bloody end of things instead.

But what really bothered me this time around were the POV characters themselves. After reading such well-written POV characters in book one, Kevah and Micah both felt fully realized and compelling from the start, these new characters felt like a huge downgrade in comparison. They're so indecisive it borders on bipolar swings in personality and motivation, to the point where it genuinely became annoying to read. They're hard to relate to and even harder to root for, constantly flip-flopping in ways that felt less like intentional character complexity and more like the writing itself couldn't settle on who these people actually were.

Instead of the big battles and large-scale conflict that defined book one, this one feels much more like a palace intrigue story. But it gets so twisted and so convoluted that the plot becomes genuinely harder and harder to follow as it goes on. Maybe I'm just missing something and other people don't feel this way, but that's honestly how it landed for me.

I'd also like to mention that just because we have different POV characters this time doesn't mean we don't get to see characters from book one. We do, but their roles are so insignificant that it ends up feeling hollow rather than satisfying. And, minor spoiler warning here for anyone who hasn't read book one, in the final battle of the first book, an actual god was summoned into the world, and in this sequel, that event seems to have had almost no lasting impact on anything. To me, that felt genuinely unrealistic, an event of that magnitude should have reshaped the world in some meaningful way, and the fact that it barely gets acknowledged bothered me as well.

Overall, this was an okay second entry in the series. It suffers most, in my opinion, from a weak set of main protagonists, and between that and the increasingly convoluted plot, I think I'm going to take a break from this series for now. If you loved book one for Kevah and Micah specifically, temper your expectations here, but if you're mainly here for the setting, the theming, and Akhtar's willingness to keep expanding this world, there's still enough good in this one to make it worth reading.

3 out of 5 stars.