An unremarkable ending for an unremarkable trilogy. 

This book has the same plotting problems as the previous one - far too many pages of the mid-section of the book are taken up by the characters sailing away from the city under magical siege on a quest for the macguffin to defeat the villain. The macguffin in question could quite easily have been located in the palace (since the king has wanted one for some years), or manufactured (since one of the characters knows how to do so, but refuses on moral grounds), but presumably Schwab was determined to confine them on a ship as a convenient way to force character drama, and also to get most of the cast out of the palace so the villains can more easily enact their schemes there. The only really useful plot development to come out of this sidequest which couldn’t have been written in some other, more succint and/or poignant way is that Lila is made to grant an unspecified favor to the proprietor of the magical black market, a set up for a sequel trilogy that would not be written until several years later. 

The one thing I did really like about this book was that the mysteries of

Kell’s parents and Lila’s missing eye

were left unresolved . As an adopted person, adopted characters having no knowledge of, and no particular need or desire for knowledge of, their biological parents is something I really identify with and I wish that was more common in fiction to balance out the plethora of stories with the usual tropes about secret royalty and heroic (or villainous) family legacies and so on. 

The romance between Rhy and Alucard had some surprisingly touching moments and was much more compelling and genuine than the half-baked romance between Kell and Lila, but Alucard’s backstory about

his abusive brother trafficking him into slavery on a ship to cure him from being gay

feels like a cheap grab for sympathy and an easy, palatably unproblematic resolution to their past break-up drama; it comes out of nowhere because at no previous point in the story has homophobia been an issue. On this aspect, I still have the same complaint from my review of the first book about the socio-political situation in Red London being under-detailed to a degree that is inexplicable in a story that revolves around a royal family. Clearly royal blood is seen to matter, since Kell is adopted by the royals but not in line for the throne, so are there laws about the legitimacy of heirs? Shouldn’t we be concerned that Rhy is infertile anyway, since the book keeps reminding us that he’s technically a dead corpse animated by Kell’s life force? After the release of the first book of the sequel trilogy, it’s nice to know that at least some of the questions about the mechanics of a non-traditional royal family are answered, but it was certainly weak writing at the time. 

As much as I absolutely fucking loathe character-death-as-redemption,

Holland’s death to restore magic to White London landed okay, because it was foreshadowed plenty. Holland is only significantly developed in this book, and all of that development is focused on the number of people he’s killed and the circumstances of each killing; because he explicitly sets for himself the goal of dying as atonement, and is never given anything to live for, there is no surprise and little sadness in his death. My strongest feeling about him really is that he was wasted as a character. I also liked Kell’s guard Hasta, but he was death-flagged so hard for the entire book that it was almost comical, so when his death scene finally arrived I hardly felt that one, either.

Osaron, embodiment of dark magic and the force of entropy, is a disappointingly boring villain (largely because he’s not an actual human character with anything approaching real emotions or personal history or sympathetic qualities whatsoever), and the way he’s defeated is incredibly anticlimactic and doesn’t even feel particularly connected with the previously established concepts in the story. Since Osaron spreads his corruption through a magical plague that causes people to relive their worst memories, psychologically weakening them until they give into his possession, and those who are able to resist his torture and survive the illness have their blood turned glowing silver (regardless of whether they have magic), and there’s a few scenes about the importance of the common people of the city and such, I expected that the climax of the story was going to involve some kind of mass awakening of light magic in the populace (Grisha trilogy spoilers:

similar to the redistribution of Alina’s sun summoning powers at the end of R&R

). But instead, the world is saved by three wizards with two macguffins in a magical showdown.