Tuesday, January 23, 2018

The Rose & the Dagger (The Wrath and the Dawn #2) by Renee Ahdieh

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌗 out of 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Synopsis:
The darker the sky, the brighter the stars.

In a land on the brink of war, Shahrzad is forced from the arms of her beloved husband, the Caliph of Khorasan. She once thought Khalid a monster—a merciless killer of wives, responsible for immeasurable heartache and pain—but as she unraveled his secrets, she found instead an extraordinary man and a love she could not deny. Still, a curse threatens to keep Shazi and Khalid apart forever.

Now she’s reunited with her family, who have found refuge in the desert, where a deadly force is gathering against Khalid—a force set on destroying his empire and commanded by Shazi’s spurned childhood sweetheart. Trapped between loyalties to those she loves, the only thing Shazi can do is act. Using the burgeoning magic within her as a guide, she strikes out on her own to end both this terrible curse and the brewing war once and for all. But to do it, she must evade enemies of her own to stay alive.

The saga that began with The Wrath and the Dawn takes its final turn as Shahrzad risks everything to find her way back to her one true love again.
I think that this book is one of those instances where the second book exceeds the first. There was much more happening in this book. While there was not a lot of bloodshed or what one might think of as a typical battle, the amount of tension was insane. There were so many points where I was on the edge of my seat wondering if one of the characters that I had come to love was going to meet their end. The Rose and the Dagger helped me to appreciate The Wrath and the Dawn even more because everything that happened in The Rose and the Dagger was set up so well by what was explained in it. 
I loved how the events in this book were laid out. Everything had a timing and purpose behind it which I appreciated. It also made for a more action-packed book with so much happening over the course of the book. I was glad to see that certain characters from the first book were not as prominent in this one. There was one particular character that rubbed me the wrong way and managed to annoy me whenever she spoke. This might be another reason why I loved this book so much more than the first as well.
I would have liked for the pacing towards the end of the book to have been slower. I barely had enough time to grasp one thing happening before another followed quickly after. I think that it might have been better if everything that happened within the last 50-100 pages would have been spread out more so that I could have took it all in better. 

1 comment:

  1. It’s rare but I love when the second book is better than the first.

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