As She Ascends (Fallen Isles, #2)

by Jodi Meadows

[ladygrey]

This is an interesting book. Normally I’d complain about the repetition where Mira reminds the reader through her inner monologue of past events.... that happened in THIS book. It happens all the time and normally it drives me crazy because, I know—I just read it. But this time I put the book down for nearly a month and suddenly I appreciated those reminders of what happened just a few chapters ago.

Also Mira is a conundrum. She’s all blazing with power one moment and full of rage that won’t tame her. But then almost her entire inner monologue is, ‘I messed up.’ ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘I didn’t mean to offend them.’ ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’ It’s actually kind of aggravating because there’s no balance to it. It’s all self recrimination even for the moments where she seizes her power and stops being afraid—she beats herself up for that too!

She maybe grows out of it a little at the end (we’ll see in the next book). Embraces her power and finds her voice and stops being afraid. The scenes with her parents were pretty satisfying. It maybe won’t last but she’s already grown as a character from the first book so i expect to see that continue.

Plus there’s allusions to Star Trek with One and basically the Algotti Empire as the Federation with its Prime Directive.

And for all the endless world building and martyr heroine, it’s still hold’s my interest and (mostly) doesn’t annoy me so I don’t want to throw it across the room for being 600 pages. And I want to read the third one to see how it all ends. Which is really saying something.