Well. This book was kinda boring. 🫤 I still flew through it (mostly due to the great audiobook, I think), but boyyyyy lemme tell ya: I did not care at all about what was happening. 🫠

I think this book is a perfect example of “2nd book syndrome” – not much really happened; Essun was mostly just sulking around (which is understandable, but boring to read about in an epic fantasy series); we spent most of the time in the exact same place (which would’ve been fine, if *something* interesting was happening, but that wasn’t the case); we were already introduced to this really interesting world, after all, so the intrigue from the 1st book was completely gone; there was a lot of info-dumping (which was interesting, in it of itself, but like… can we get to the action? Can we make Alabaster do something other than be cryptic?)…

I do think Nassun’s POVs had the ***potential*** to be more interesting – her traveling to a new comm with her dad who hates her and wants to “cure” her orogeny, and then meeting Schaffa, learning to control her powers and realizing she likes that power is quite intriguing. However, we didn’t even see much of this, or at least not ENOUGH for me to fully care about her POVs, tbh. It’s like Nassun’s story, on paper, could’ve been an entire book, full of plot twists, development and intrigue. But here we only saw a very simplified and quick version of that *potential* tale, so her story was just very plain.

In general, the whole book was quite plain and average, tbh. I could summarize everything that happened in just a couple of sentences: Essun is in an underground colony (that accepts orogenes, which is a rarety!); she just lives there and helps around; she learns more about the obelisks and the stone eaters; another comm attacks them (since it’s a Season, and survival is difficult) and Essun helps defeat them. Nassun travels to a new comm and learns to control her powers, against her father’s wishes.

I honestly didn’t care about most of what was happening, or about the characters themselves. In actuality, just like with book 1, my indifference towards these characters was noticeable (and intensified, somehow). I followed these characters for 2 entire books, but somehow I have yet to connect with them. If they died, I genuinely wouldn’t feel a thing. I’m just completely indifferent to them, strangely enough.

Another (small) thing that bothered me was the fact that the map wasn’t updated. I already didn’t like that a lot of the locations mentioned in book 1 weren’t even on the map (even when they were big cities). In book 2 the map was WORSE, because not only did it not show most of the locations mentioned in the story, but it also wasn’t updated to follow the *canon* of the story! Like, book 1 ended with the world completely changed, and many cities disappearing. Why wasn’t the map updated? I LOVE maps in books, but this map was kind of irrelevant in book 1 (due to the lack of information) and completely useless in book 2 (due to the lack of info PLUS the complete inaccuracy). 🙄

So, overall, this book was a miss for me, and I genuinely don’t know if I would’ve finished it if it wasn’t for the audiobook. This just felt like a setup for book 3, but given the fact that I didn’t care AT ALL about the story or the characters, that setup wasn’t even intriguing enough for me to even WANT to continue this series. Like, truly, I DO NOT CARE about this series AT ALL. I don’t even care enough to look up spoilers about how it ends… I’m SO INDIFFERENT to this story! 😐 The only reason why I might read book 3 is so I can say I actually finished this trilogy. We’ll see how it goes.