The Map of Bones (Fire Sermon, #2)

by Francesca Haig

The second book in Francesca Haig’s critically acclaimed debut fantasy series.

The ashes of the past cannot hide the truth forever.

The Omega resistance has been brutally attacked, its members dead or in hiding.

The Alpha Council’s plan for permanently containing the Omegas has begun.

But all is not entirely lost: the Council’s seer, The Confessor, is dead, killed by her twin’s sacrifice.

Cass is left haunted by visions of the past, while her brother Zach’s cruelty and obsession pushes her to the edge, and threatens to destroy everything she hopes for.

As the country moves closer to all-out civil war, Cass will learn that to change the future she will need to uncover the past. But nothing can prepare her for what she discovers: a deeply buried secret that raises the stakes higher than ever before.

• ISBN13: 9780007563098
• Publish Date: 7 April 2016
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: HarperVoyager
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 448
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

Reviews

[shannonmiz]

You can find the full review and all the fancy and/or randomness that accompanies it at It Starts at Midnight
3.5*
This sequel picks up where The Fire Sermon ended, and while it took me a couple minutes to reacquaint myself with the characters, I remembered pretty much everything that went down in book one. (Which I won't tell you about, spoiler free here people.)

Anyway. The first half of the book, I won't lie, it was slow. Like, to the point that it seemed a bit repetitive and I was kind of bored. I felt like a lot of it was the same plot being rehashed, and that it was almost just filling space until the action began. That said, there were some new characters whose additions I enjoyed, so that kept me going during the first fifty to sixty percent.

But then things started to pick up quite a bit, and I felt like the story really took off again. The readers were given quite a bit of information on the world, which I loved, and the stakes got incredibly high. This series doesn't pull any punches- if the characters are being awful, there's not going to be sugar coating, and sometimes it can be hard to read, but it makes it feel much more authentic.

As the plot progressed and we got to know more about the world and the characters, I became very invested in the story again, and am very excited to see how the third book wraps things up! I have a feeling that there will be a lot of great secrets revealed, just as there were in this book.

Bottom Line: Despite a very slow beginning, this book does a great job of further developing a series that creates a very vivid picture of an eerie post apocalyptic world that keeps unraveling its secrets.

**Copy provided for review