I really loved this book and I think, if I just went off of how much I enjoyed reading it, I could have given it 5 stars. However, there were a couple of glaring faults I could not overlook. I'll get those out of the way first.

A Gathering of Shadows is such a tone shift from book one. Book one had really high stakes, and set up this really interesting world of stacked London's. This book was super fun but had really low stakes. It essentially went from saving the world, to fighting in a pretty safe competition... Normally, as books go on, the stakes go up. If this had been the plot of book one, I think it would have made more sense. It did at the end however, set up the start of book three which sounds like the stakes are going to be higher.

Second, one of my favourite things about book one was how quickly the plot got moving. That was not the case in this book... Kell and Lila don't have any direct interactions until page 427!

However, I did enjoy most of the character interactions (if we ignore Lila literally telling Alucard that she is 'not like other girls'... *sigh* And as my only criticism of book one was not really getting to know Rhy very much - this was a great thing. I did think that Kell was a bit overdramatic when it came to his hostility with Alucard seeing as Rhy was the one injured and he didn't even seem to care. I really hate both the king and the queen and I really hope the end up being even more arseholes so that I have an excuse to continue hating them.

All in all, an excellent book but a little bit tonally apart from book one. Just going into it expecting a lot of fun and low stakes.